(Podgorica, 27 July 2012) – Three packages of documentation that MANS, along with 600 workers, brought before the public prosecutors as a result of 29 destroyed enterprises in Montenegro contain information about how judicial rulings were ignored and how these companies were illegally privatized.
Traces and evidence of this still exists, which means that the prosecutors that had requested new facts in order to open an investigation into the damaging privatizations of enterprises in Montenegro’s north now have plenty to deal with. They will find how bankruptcy judges and others managed to forcefully obtain worker shares, enterprise properties and the businesses in question.
The most obvious example of all this are two ski resorts – one in Kolasin and one in Zabljak – whose illegal privatization is one of the ones dealt with in the criminal case.
Ratko Coguric, a worker at the Kolasin “Ski Centre” and a signatory to the criminal charges filed with public prosecutors, claims that the introduction of bankruptcy proceedings at his workplace and at the Ski Centre “Bjelasica” share all the elements of organized crime.
He had already initiated a process six years ago concerning these illegal actions. As a result the High Court confirmed that the bankruptcy was illegally introduced and was confirmed again by the Economic Court judge in the case.
In the meantime, a part of the evidence disappeared from the Economic Court in Podgorica, which as it turns out were stolen. The police confirmed that the door of the office where the documents were being held had been forcibly broken into though it never established who had ordered and carried out the disappearance of these documents.
Coguric, in his statement for the court, reaffirms that the workers of the Ski Centre aren’t victims of ‘transition’ but of the ‘criminals’ in the judiciary. It is because of them that the owner of the Ski Centre “Bepler and Jakobson,” which it turns out belongs formally to the Becirovic brothers, still holds property that was essentially stolen and that is worth millions of euros.
The same goes for the Ski Centre in Zabljak, which has been almost completely appropriated by director Radovan Grbovic and against whom numerous decision and judicial rulings exist calling on him to return the enterprise’s properties that he assigned to himself.
In states where the rule of law is respected ignoring the law in this way is hard to imagine, however, in Montenegro, the Becirovic’s, Grbovic’s, Mugosa’s and others that are able to ignore judicial rulings – since they are part of the network that captured the state and are destroying its economy – and instead use properties they have appropriated for their own purposes and those of the First Family – their protectors.
How to explain otherwise the fact that they are not following judicial rulings, with countless rulings against them simply sitting in the archives. MANS and the workers affected by these cases have delivered yet another package of evidence to the prosecutor in the hopes that at least one honest individual will investigate what has been happening in the north.
