(Podgorica, 6 December 2012) – The fight against corruption in Montenegro has not given any concrete results, largely thanks to the Montenegrin judiciary whose actions tend to be more favourable to those who are violating the law, than in favour of the public interest and the rule of law.
In the past five years, MANS alone has submitted some 500 criminal charges against senior public and political functionaries, but also the government’s so-called ‘strategic investors’ who have also been violating the law (usually in the realm of urban development, public procurement and privatization). For more than half the cases, state prosecutors have spent months and years without replying to our charges, while we’ve only heard that they are investigating only a few dozen of these cases.
Montenegrin prosecutors rejected as many as 211 of the cases we filed. Many of these were rejected because they stated that they simply did not gather information, in some cases they argued that there was no evidence of breaches of the law (only to begin investigating these same cases following many years of public and international pressure). In some cases, prosecutors, as a reason for rejecting criminal cases cited evidence that directly contradicted available evidence. There are also cases that confirm all the facts demonstrating that the law was violated, but the prosecutors still refused to initiate an investigation.
For instance, MANS case against the suspicious recapitulation of the EPCG by Italy’s A2A, including the involvement of Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, were rejected because prosecutor’s state that they “will not undertake the prosecution against any person due to any criminal offense that is prosecuted ex officio.” Other than this sentence, there was no other rationalization for refusing to investigate. On the other hand, their colleagues in the Italian judiciary have initiated an investigation into Berlusconi’s Minister for Economic Development Claudio Scajola who had signed an economic memorandum with Montenegro worth €5-billion. Scajola is being accused for paying bribes to foreign officials during the deals that were concluded.
Our prosecutors also rejected MANS cases that later turned into affairs investigated by officials from other states. One of the most famous of these is the case involving the offshore company Fiesta and its questionable contracts with the state-run television station RTCG as early as 2009. Podgorica’s Basic Court rejected the case arguing there was no breach of the law. A few years later, in the context of the famous “Telekom” affair it turned out that Fiesta was one of the four companies that were used to pay bribes to Montenegrin officials involved in the privatization deal, according to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
We can also cite the case of the infamous “Aqua Park” in Budva, for which MANS submitted a complaint in early 2009, arguing that the contract for building the complex – signed by the Municipality of Budva and a Cyprus-based company – was damaging to the interests of the municipality. The Basic Court of Kotor rejected the complaint at that time. It was only after MANS uncovered that behind the Cypriot firm stood Svetozar Marovic’s son, earlier this year, that prosecutors finally initiated an investigation. In the meantime the deal fell through, while the municipality was saddled with the debts of its Cypriot partner (an outcome that MANS had warned about in 2009).
The third case of this type, involves the controversy surrounding “Carine” and the purchase of a valuable parcel of land in the Old Airport neighbourhood of the capital without a tender and in a direct deal with Podgorica’s Mayor Miomir Mugosa. MANS’ complaint was first rejected. However after the High Court, in a separate procedure, confirmed the damaging consequences of the deal. As a result MANS launched new charges against Mugosa and the Carine company, but prosecutors are still staying quiet.
There are numerous cases in which prosecutors’ have ‘creatively’ assessed the proof we’ve submitted (always to the advantage of individuals and companies against which criminal charges were laid).
One example is the case against the Mayor of Budva, Lazar Radjenovic, who was charged by MANS on suspicion that with Dusan Delic, the father of Ivan Delic, he had signed a bad agreement to sell municipal lands at a low price. The agreement was concluded before the parcels were accounted for in the urban planning document, affecting their value. After selling the land, the Municipality of Budva amended the planning documentation and allowed Delic to build on the purchased parcels, thus significantly increasing its value and securing an enormous profit for him (at the expense of the municipality). Regardless of the evidence that Radjenovic knew that the plan would be amended even before the sale, Kotor prosecutors rejected the case on the basis of assertions made by the Municipality of Budva and Radjenovic that all was in order.
A similar judgement of evidence was the basis for rejected the case against the Director of the Traffic Department, Veselin Grbovic, accused for abuse of office in the building of a section of the Risan-Zabljak road for openly showing favouritism towards the Bemax company. The conditions for participating in the tender included bank guarantees that the interested company had to submit as evidence that it was financially capable of carrying out the project. Bemax landed the contract even though it failed to provide the required bank guarantees (which should have resulted in automatic disqualification). The lack of guarantees in Bemax’s offer in early August 2009 was confirmed by the prosecutor, highlighting that the guarantees provided by Erste Bank were only submitted in late August 2009 (nearly a month after the tender deadline). Even though this fact demonstrated claims that Grbovic had illegally given the project to Bemax, the prosecutor used Bemax’s tender as evidence that its offer was correct (thereby rejecting the criminal charges files).
Not even the direct admission of the existence of legal violations during an investigation was sufficient at times to trigger the interest of prosecutors and to initiate a full on trial against senior public functionaries. One such example is the case MANS’ filed in September 2011 against the “Jadransko brodogradiliste” (Adriatic Shipbuilding) company and its director Stanko Zlokovic (on suspicion of illegal construction). In spite of an Administrative Court ruling annulling its building permit, that company nevertheless continued building a residential/business building (affirmed by the prosecutors). Nevertheless, in the eventual explanation of its decision to reject the complaint, prosecutors note that the shipbuilding company could continue operating without a licence since we were dealing with construction whose cessation would cause material damages (having obtained approval by the relevant Ministry – after the completion of the works).
All of the above leads one to conclude that the public prosecutors are part of the problem and a serious obstacle in the fight against corruption (instead of being one of the main actors in this process). The fact hat never a single state prosecutor didn’t face disciplinary actions, let along criminal sanctions for their actions is hard to believe when we consider the above examples. These and many other cases demonstrate that the state prosecutors office, as an institutions is not only not doing its job – in accordance with the law and on its own initiative is uncovering corruption – but it invests significant efforts to marginalize clear and concrete evidence and lessen their import.
Unfortunately, such a situation is a direct consequence of the enormous influence that key political actors exercise over the judiciary, as well as the lack of readiness on the part of senior public prosecutors to independently do their job as prescribed by the law. This is why we claim that such a judiciary represents an enormous barrier in the process of European integration and we believe that the Supreme State Prosecutor will not last much longer, given the proclivity for endearing oneself to those in power instead of protecting the public interest.
