In less than two years of work, ending with the session of September 1, 2022, the outgoing Government passed as many as 1.258 decisions on the appointment of acting officials in the state administration, which refer to 290 persons
Of these, 230 were appointed between two and eight times consecutively as acting officers for a period of three months.
The law allows this to be done only once, which means that on this basis alone, 972 decisions, or 77 percent, were illegal, which means that appointed persons managed state administration bodies without grounds for a total of 2.916 months.
The aforementioned data was announced by Transparency Serbia, a non-governmental organization focused on the fight against corruption.
Referring to the data of the Personnel Management Service, they stated that there are currently 408 positions, of which only 41 percent or 167 have been filled through the implementation of the competition.
"The rest of the posts are occupied by acting officials, the vast majority of whom were appointed illegally, or are kept as unfilled, because the mandate of the acting officials has expired and the Government is waiting for it to be retroactively validated," said Transparency.
There are also funny discoveries.
In 369 cases, the Government made decisions retroactively, setting as the date of commencement of duties a day that had already passed at that moment. On average, the government sent these officials back in time for 13 days, and in the most drastic case even 188, Transparency announced.
So, for example, on April 15, 2021, the Government appointed Filip Radović to the position of Acting Director of the Environmental Protection Agency, for a period of three months, but starting on October 9, 2020. In that period, in November 2020, the dismissal Whistleblower Milenko Jovanović was appointed head of air quality issues at the Environmental Protection Agency.
"Until the dismissal of Radović in November 2021, the government passed as many as 23 illegal decisions on his appointment as an acting official," stated Transparency.
This gross violation of the law could be stopped if the Administrative Court declares the illegal decisions null and void. On June 21 last year, the Republic's Public Prosecutor's Office accepted the arguments from the Transparency initiative and filed a lawsuit for the declaration of nullity of the decision in which the Law was most drastically violated. "The Administrative Court, however, has not yet made a decision, and refuses to provide information on whether the Government of Serbia has responded to the lawsuit and what arguments it has used to defend its illegal actions," Transparency pointed out.
S.Ć./FoNet
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