(Podgorica, 3 July 2012) – MANS today submitted yet another set of criminal charges to Djurdjina Ivanovic, the State Prosecutor for Organized Crime, Corruption and War Crimes, against several individuals accused of hiding illegal actions carried out at the First Bank, including money-laundering.
Because of abuse of position for a prolonged period of time, the following individuals find themselves on the list of accused submitted to Ivanovic: Radoje Zugic, the current governor of the Central Bank of Montenegro (CBM) and the former president of the Board of Directors of the First Bank; Aleksandar Damjanovic, MP and the president of the Committee for Budgets and Finances; Zarija Franovic, a former MP and member of the same Committee; as well as Predrag Drecun, once the leading Executive Director of the First Bank.
The First Bank itself is also found on the list of accused, since it failed to respect the legal procedures in registering all data about the accounts held by offshore companies in the bank. It later turned out that one of these, the Camarilla Corporation, is mentioned in the evidence used to convict Dusko Saric (some €7.4-million was laundered through this company).
Drecun and Zugic are responsible, according to the criminal charges filed, for evading and publicly falsifying information concerning the receipt and return of government bailout funds that the First Bank received. Damjanovic and Franovic are also suspected of suppressing this information instead of undertaking a serious investigation into the obvious irregularities at the First Bank, which they should have done given their position as members of this Parliamentary committee.
Let us recall that in July 2010 the Assembly of Montenegro (parliament) adopted the Law on the Central Bank of Montenegro that secured a change in its management (after pointing out illegalities in the work of the First Bank for the previous three years).
The newly appointed governor of the CBM was Radoje Zugic, the former president of the Board of Directors of the First Bank at the time when it received €44-million in government credits. This appointment ensured that the CBM would not exercise its oversight role over the First Bank.
After all this, at Predrag Drecun’s call, Zugic, Damjanovic and Franovic, as well as other members of the Assembly’s Committee for the Economy, the Budget and Finances held a meeting in the First Bank in May 2010.
Zugic and Franovic were familiar with the way that for years money from the state budget was withdrawn from the First Bank.
Similarly, Damjanovic had known prior to this meeting in the First Bank the ways in which that bank managed to “return” its first repayment (then Minister of Finance Igor Luksic transfered €1-million from the state budget to the account of the regional water utility’s account in the First Bank eleven times within a half hour, while the First Bank at the same time managed to return the same €1-million eleven times into the accounts of the state treasury).
In spite of this, Damjanovic undertook no measures in order to reveal the commission of such illegal actions. Instead, he publicly declared that the Committee that he runs will not undertake such investigations since “the Parliament is working till Friday, when the summer recess begins.”
In order to hide the evident illegalities and the continued accumulation of private profits at public expense, Damjanovic also publicly justified state support for the First Bank that was never returned in the end.
Following his meeting with Zugic, Damjanovic and Franovic, Drecun publicly announced that the First Bank in the last year and a half has been working with full liquidity (even though he knew that the First Bank only regained liquidity in September 2009, exclusively as a result of state funds that were received from the sale of a significant share of the Electric Power Company of Montenegro, EPCG).
After making this announcement in the media concerning the First Bank’s overall health, the accused sought to remove or discourage individuals who were in a position to eventually come out with information and point to evidence concerning the carrying out of criminal acts.
In this way, Zugic as the governor of the Central Bank, publicly announced that he would submit to public institutions an investigations into how CBM reports that prove the commission of criminal acts by Zugic himself and the other accused individuals, ended up in the public domain.
In this way, the accused have demonstrated that they have the power to – through their influence on state institutions – issue orders to investigate those who uncover their misdeeds. They thus have captured state institutions in order to ensure that they will not be investigating their criminal deeds.
Along with the charges filed by MANS, evidence has also been submitted like in yesterday’s filling against Milo Djukanovic, Igor Luksic and Radoje Zugic that remove any doubts about the above.
