The date is arbitrary. I remember it was springtime and bright cloudy, so it could have been any time between april and now. The engine in DBA's first yugo was allegedly worn out. True, it clocked at least 200.000 km so far, in just three years, which is astonishing for a Zastava. Usually you had to do a general before half that.
I think I drove that to the brother of Brata, somewhere in my wider neighborhood, as he'll arrange for the engine to be replaced. Now he wasn't any kind of shop, not that I knew. Brata and Sale were in the latter's Corolla, so we left the yugo there and went on whichever business we had.
The old engine sounded right to me. You'd hear the valves clicking here and there, when accelerating more heavily, but it wasn't getting worse - it was just the same as when it was new. Sounded like a bit of murky business, but okay, perhaps I'm not the engine tuner with perfect hearing. The engine was, indeed, replaced within a few days and the car kept on, making more thousands of kilometers. The story goes that a yugo is a lottery, you may get all kinds of trouble or you may get one that could well outlive you, and we got lucky.
Not so lucky the next time with this guy. After we sold all 123 machines and 40 UPSes from the last batch, it was time to procure the next one. This time we didn't pretend to be exporting anything, it was his part of the deal. He got some 22 or 25000$ from DBA, to pass to Acrotech on Taiwan. Which never happened. The money was just gone. He did report some procedural trouble, how he kept trying to pass the money to his company in Greece, how it got into some administrative snafu... Amazingly, not only Brata came out it scat free, Sale also wasn't called on this. Except a couple of times, perhaps. We were still a society owned, selfmanaged enterprise, and actually having so much currency in cash was illegal at least, that was money off the books. Or maybe it was on the books, which would make it even more interesting... Well, nobody I spoke with knew this in any detail, and now, 30 years later, who knows if anyone would remember.
But the money was still gone.