Centre for Civic Education (CCE) received today 6 (six) decisions by which Jelena Perović, director of the Agency for Prevention of Corruption (APC), partially acted upon the CCE Initiative and determined that former DPS MPs Ana Nikolić, Momčilo Martinović, Danijel Živković, Filip Vuković, Željko Aprcović and Petar Smolović violated the Law on Prevention of Corruption by not reporting credible property records for 2017 to the APC.
On 14 May 2018, the CCE sent to the APC an Initiative requesting to determine the violation of the law on this basis for 25 MPs of then ruling coalition. This was followed by a number of urgencies, including the last one from 24 July 2020. The decisions made by Perović in the case of these six former DPS MPs are the only ones that were possible and legal.
Today, the CCE asked the director of the APC to urgently submit decisions for 19 other persons against whom there are charges, and for whom we duly and long ago submitted material. This refers to Branimir Gvozdenović, Miodrag Radunović, Obrad Stanišić, Andrija Nikolić, Mirsad Mulić, Maja Bakrač, Predrag Sekulić, Bogdan Fatić, Branko Čavor, Nikola Rakočević, Milorad Vuletić, Jovanka Laličić, Radul Novović, Andrija Popović, Ervin Ibrahimović, Nedžad Drešević, Mić Orlandić, Genci Nimanbegu and Adrian Vuksanović, as well as amendment of the decision for Petar Smolović. The CCE also requested an amendment in the part of the information whether the director of APC submitted a request to initiate misdemeanor proceedings against these persons.
The CCE states that the APC needed to only partially comply with the law on the initiative of the CCE almost 28 months, but also that Perović made the decision the day after the results of the parliamentary elections in 2020 were announced, in which the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) lost its majority after 30 years. This confirms that APC was tied by the party, as well as the new director when in such a simple case she could not decide until she received official confirmation that the parliamentary majority had changed, i.e. that she measured what she would do instead of acting strictly according to the law.
The CCE expects that Perović will act more diligently upon today’s Urgency and that she will not have a problem to quickly decide about other persons, regardless of whether they have more real or perceived institutional and party power. We also hope that the director of the APC will in the future, professionally and unencumbered by party discipline, decide efficiently and indiscriminately regardless of the person reported, which does not seem to have been the case so far.
The CCE will continuously report various identified irregularities to the APC and at the same time test the level of professionalism and independence of the APC.
Vasilije Radulović, Programme Associate