Things are even worse.

Due to the great pressure of the student and national revolt after the fall of the canopy in Novi Sad, the president of Serbia Aleksandar Vučić he decided to offer an equally "great" answer. He announced a final, merciless fight against corruption, the likes of which no one here has ever seen, saying that no one will be spared in that fight.

During February and March, arrests of corruption suspects became almost daily. So far, about 170 people have been detained and about 50 criminal charges filed. Allegedly, some "untouchables" also fell, and the action should appear to be comprehensive: they were arrested from the former mayor to officials to the director of a public company, from big businessmen to presidents of small rural communities, from farmers to police officers. The fight against corruption began pompously, like a bang, on February 12, with the arrest of the president of the municipality of Obrenovac, Milorad Grčić, who had been the director of the EPS for years before that.

And just a day before, the organization Transparency Serbia (TS) presented at a press conference the latest data on the corruption perception index CPI 2024 (Corruption Perceptions Index). It is about the global ranking of countries according to the perception of corruption in the public sector. According to these data, for the eighth year in a row, Serbia continued to fall in the international rankings, and last year it fell by one more place. Now it is in the worst position since 2012, more precisely in 105th place out of a total of 180 countries. With an index of 35, where the range of scores is from 0 to 100, Serbia is in second last place among the countries in the region, behind it is only Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In addition, our interlocutor Nemanja Nenadic, program director of Transparency Serbia, gives another insight in an interview with "Vreme": "Information related to the global corruption perception index, which we have been publishing since 2003, used to be transmitted by media close to the government and those who criticized the government, because they knew it was important. In recent years, this data has been ignored not only by the pro-government private media, but also by RTS".

"WEATHER" At the conference, you said that the fight against corruption is not a priority for either the executive or legislative authorities in Serbia. Would you like to now?, after all the arrests for corruption, changed their statement?

NEMANJA NENADIC: That assessment comes from everything that the executive and legislative authorities should be doing in order for the anti-corruption system to function and be improved, and which they are not doing. It certainly doesn't come from the number of arrests, because they shouldn't even decide that. What is happening now, when the president promises results in the fight against corruption "by the end of March", and then the prosecutors realize it, is an indication that the system is functioning in a strange way. Prosecutors are waiting for a signal from the political elite to launch investigations into cases they apparently had knowledge of before.

We see money embezzlement as the reasons for the arrest, irregular registration of overtime, tax evasion and domesticated by it "cash withdrawal", so sometimes it is not clear whether it is theft or corruption. We don't even know what happens to all that "pulled out" with money, whether and how it was further used, for corrupt actions or for something else?

The matrix that we have seen in previous years is repeated, especially through announcements about arrests that are regularly published in the section "Stop corruption" on the website of the Government of Serbia. The pattern, which is being repeated here and now, is that the fight against corruption is also called what has nothing to do with it. The confusion arises because in the prosecution and the police, these investigations are handled by their organizational units, which have "corruption suppression" in their name, but are also responsible for various types of economic crime. That is why it happens that the investigations against the owners of private companies who have found some illegal way to reduce their tax obligations are called the fight against corruption, even though there is no indication that, for example, these owners bribed any government official to enable them to do such malfeasance. It is not in dispute that such crimes are investigated, but the confusion that is created in the public, creating the impression that the results in the fight against corruption are greater than they really are. That is why it is necessary to clearly show what has been done when it comes to the abuse of official position, in the detection of receiving and giving bribes, in suppressing influence peddling, but also for some criminal acts that represent a negligible part in prosecutorial and police statistics, for example abuses in connection with public procurement, receiving and giving bribes in connection with voting or criminal acts prescribed by the Law on the Financing of Political Activities and the Law on the Prevention of Corruption.

photo: marija janković

Where exactly are the grounds for suspicion of corruption in the case of the reconstruction of the railway station in Novi Sad?

Regarding that case, the TS first clearly showed that the interstate agreement between Serbia and China does not contain provisions that would provide for the secrecy of all documents, although based on the first statements of our officials, one could get such an impression.

To this day, the public has not received a clear answer to one of the key previous questions regarding possible corruption in this case - how much did the reconstruction cost in general. And where did that money go? After all the published documents, it is not possible to find a logical explanation for the statement of Minister Vesić at the opening of the Railway Station, which was then repeated in a more precise manner by Aleksandar Vučić. These are the data according to which the reconstruction cost 65 million euros for the entire complex in Novi Sad, of which close to 16 million euros was given for the station building itself. On the other hand, what can be seen in Annex 1 is that for the station building in 2021, the contracted price is 3,3 million dollars; from other annexes it can be seen that the subsequently agreed works are worth almost three million dollars. There are also estimates of the value of the works made by CIP, where in 2021 the estimate was about 3,5 million euros, and that in October 2023, CIP estimated the value of the performed works at about 4,8 million euros. There is still no logical explanation for the difference between the price announced by the politicians and what is currently seen in the documentation. What is closest in the contracts to this price mentioned by the former minister and the president is the total value of all architectural works on the railway from Novi Sad to the Hungarian border. So, not only the works in Novi Sad, but also the stations in Subotica, Vrbas and all other places were supposed to be worth around 15 million euros, which was said to have been given only for the station building in Novi Sad.

What would be the most important piece of documentation that is missing because it has not been published or may not even exist?

On the financial side, the key missing data, in addition to what I have already mentioned, concerns the method of selecting subcontractors. This work was contracted without applying the Law on Public Procurement, that is, the intergovernmental agreement between Serbia and China served as the legal basis for awarding the work directly to a consortium of two Chinese companies. When a job is contracted without competition, the logical question is whether a realistic price is being paid. Since the contract itself stipulates that about half of the work will be done by domestic companies, then we come to the issue of subcontractors. The method of their selection is not fully defined, but the contract stipulates that the Chinese consortium was obliged to carry out a transparent procedure, without discrimination. There is not a single word in the documentation about whether that procedure was carried out at all and under what conditions. In the last set of information published on the Government's website, the Ministry of Construction explicitly claims that it does not have this information at all, which practically means that compliance with this contractual obligation has not even been checked. If we add to that the doubts that have been expressed in the public - that the subcontractors are allegedly companies that are close to the authorities in a certain way, then we come to the first point where we should examine possible corruption in connection with the reconstruction.

For the specific interest of the authorities in this case?

This is what the prosecutor's office should determine, since they have already announced that "due to public interest" they decided to investigate possible corruption as well, because its motive is usually financial gain. By the way, this is not the first time that the participation of subcontractors has been linked to corruption. The prosecution would have a much better starting position today if it had investigated some previous cases where similar suspicions arose. In the midst of the campaign for the December elections, several opposition MPs showed parts of the correspondence of, as they said, businessman Papić, who is now arrested for some other matters. There he claims that there was an influence of the authorities on the choice of subcontractors for the Fruško Gora corridor project and that part of the money they received went to finance the ruling party. The opposition filed a criminal complaint, but the outcome is still unknown.

Finally, let me emphasize - there is absolutely no justified reason why the contracts concluded by the Government of Serbia for the construction of all, and not just this, infrastructure project would not be published immediately. They will surely not wait for new blockades and protests or, far from it, they will die for this basic matter.

Does this also apply to the secrecy of documents on the procurement of respirators?, masks, vaccines and other equipment during the covid epidemic? After all, the official end of the epidemic was declared on the 14th. February this year.

The Law on Public Procurement, which was valid until mid-2020, as well as the current one, does not provide for the possibility of declaring all procurement data confidential, except in the field of defense and security. However, on March 15, 2020, the Government made a decision declaring all procurements related to combating the epidemic a state secret. Not only that, but the very conclusion declaring secrecy is a confidential document. That is why it is not known what the Government stated as a legal basis for the declaration of secrecy. After that, we heard from the Prime Minister that the secrecy will be lifted when the pandemic is over. We have no information whether this has been done, and we have not received a response to the letter to the Government.

If all the documentation would finally be opened, in connection with various cases, would it then finally be a fight against corruption?

We need a system where the publication of documents becomes a regular practice. That's just the beginning, which would likely open up further legitimate questions. If, after that publication, there are no investigations from each side, for example, the State Audit Institution from the point of view of expediency, the prosecution from the point of view of possible criminal responsibility, the problem will not be solved again, we will only fall into even deeper apathy because we know and suspect that there is a lot of corruption and nothing is being done about it. Unfortunately, we already have a large number of situations where the documents were not published by state authorities but by investigative journalists, and where the published documents very clearly indicated corruption. And if we connect it with the prosecution, it is clear that our main problem is that even the information about corruption cases that have reached the public, which are well documented - have not been investigated.

Speaking of the prosecution, two years ago VJT rejected the criminal complaint against Milorad Grčić "for unscrupulous work in the service", which also includes his false representation because even after the end of his mandate by force of law, he held the office of v. d. Director of EPS-a. Today, the same prosecutor's office charges him with abuses in that period after the end of v. d. Flow. How do we understand that??

I think it is very bad that the prosecutor's office did not accept that criminal complaint or that it did not investigate this kind of false representation not only of Grcic, but of two thirds of directors of public companies in Serbia who are not in legal status. If this had been done, the practice of illegal management of public companies would have been stopped, and at the same time situations would have been prevented where those directors, who are much easier to blackmail due to their unresolved status, also participate in some cases of corruption. Since Grcic is now being blamed for some actions that took place at the time when he was in illegal status, part of the responsibility for those abuses, if proven, is borne by the Government of Serbia, which did nothing to end the illegal management of EPS.

As part of the already started action against corruption, it is interesting that on the same day after the recent major riots in the Parliament, proposal of the Law on Amendments to the Law on Special Procedures for the Expo, submitted by the Government of Serbia, withdrawn from the agenda of the board session of the Assembly of Serbia. Do you know why??

This is unusual because it is obvious that the Government was in a hurry to additionally shorten the deadlines for the execution of works related to the Expo exhibition. It is debatable to pass special laws for any project at all because it undermines the legal system. Whenever they do something like that, the Government and the Parliament should have a clear explanation why the rules that apply to all other situations should not apply to that specific project. Of course, there is no such logical explanation, it was not there when the special law on the Expo was passed, nor is it there now when its amendments are being proposed.

The most controversial thing is that the special law excluded the application of the Law on Public Procurement, because it means that there is no legal protection if the procurement is rigged. For the procurement of special Expo companies, the procedure from the regulation adopted by the Government is applied. That decree repeats many provisions of the law, but with two significant modifications. The first is that only purchases worth more than 12 million dinars are advertised (according to the law it is one million dinars, or three million for works), and the second important difference is that there is no minimum deadline for submitting the offer. So there have already been situations where a deadline of only seven days was left for very valuable procurements, while according to the Law on Public Procurement it should not be less than 15 days. All this results in even less competition than in "regular" public procurements and most often there is only one acceptable bid, which is even worse than the usual case with public procurements, where, according to official statistics, the average number of bids is two and a half. The Constitutional Court, which is the only one that can resolve this, despite the fact that it is obviously an urgent matter, has not yet considered the initiative submitted by the Supreme Court regarding the adoption of a special law. Meanwhile, Expo companies have contracted jobs worth over 300 million euros. In addition to all that, a significant part of work related to the Expo was contracted without any competition and procedures, within the framework of international agreements.

Why are the institutions for the fight against corruption not reacting to all this?? Do we have the complete structure of those institutions??

We have all the key institutions. Most often, problems arise when they are entrusted with authority, but their duties are not sufficiently clearly defined. The law opens up a wide range of what they can do, but not what they have to do. For example, the participants of the SNS rally in May 2023 were brought to Belgrade in about 3000 buses, but the costs are still unknown. SNS did not list that event at all in its annual financial report. The Agency for the Prevention of Corruption was authorized to investigate it immediately, but had no obligation, but was waiting for the submission of the annual financial report. That report was submitted in April 2024, and the Agency's findings are still awaited. Similarly, the prosecutor's office does not have to wait for anyone's criminal complaint, it has the possibility according to the Code of Criminal Procedure to investigate a case of suspected corruption when it is documented, and they generally do not use that possibility. For example, the Stajić brothers have now been arrested on suspicion of corruption in connection with the legalization of buildings, and journalists wrote about this a few years ago, and it is not known that any proceedings were conducted then.

Can political pressure on institutions be ignored??

Political pressure is often talked about, but I am afraid that things are even worse and that in most situations, people working in institutions anticipate what they are allowed to open, where they are allowed to act and where they are not. There are also opposite examples - the Council for the fight against corruption, which was formed by the Government in 2001 and which practically has almost no powers, yet it presented dozens of reports to the public on very important topics for the fight against corruption. It's just that neither the government nor the prosecutor's office used what they established to solve systemic problems. Even if he thinks that the Council is wrong in something, the basic order is for the Government to present to the public arguments for its view on that topic, and not to ignore these reports and obstruct the work of the Council in other ways.

Which would, in your opinion, bile "urgent", necessary changes in legal regulations?

In the Law on the Prevention of Corruption, it is necessary to limit the legal possibility for running an official campaign. And secondly, to limit the possibility of wasting public resources for the needs of pre-election promotion and those in power.

In terms of public procurement - in order to prevent circumvention of the law through interstate agreements, the Constitution should be amended. Those agreements are acts of a higher order than the law, but of a lower order than the Constitution, except that our constitution does not currently have provisions that would limit the arbitrariness of the government when concluding them.

One of the most important recommendations of GRECO refers to the fact that the Law on Lobbying should include situations when government representatives come into contact in informal situations, either with professional mediators (lobbyists), or with persons who have their own interest in promoting the adoption or repeal of a regulation.

And despite everything, whether Serbia will be rated much better in the next report of the European Commission on the fight against corruption, and considering the current action?

The European Commission has its own methodology, and we have already pointed out directly to them what the current monitoring method can and cannot show. We believe that it is very wrong that Serbia's progress in the fight against corruption at a high level is measured only on the basis of statistical data on the number of indictments of the Prosecutor's Office for organized crime and accompanying verdicts. In Serbia, the performance in this field should be measured first of all by whether there were any cases where the corrupt participation of high state officials was suspected - and those cases were not investigated.