(Podgorica, October 15. 2013.) – Data obtained by MANS’s Research center rise to the suspicion that Draga Kovacevic, director of the Real Estate Administration, for a long time abuse his position in the Land register to secure, for himself, close relatives and friends, lucrative jobs and o obtain agreements with the Real Estate.
Information that is only possible to check using the identification numbers of individuals and companies, show that there is a suspicion that Kovacevic created an interesting scheme with his family and friends in order to create a monopoly in offering services, by sung calculations and the Land register, according to MANS. This also shows that Kovacevic is one of those Montenegrin officials who has a personal motives to hide the identification numbers for a long time from the public so actions and complex schemes of interest related people and companies remain undetected as long as possible, warn from MANS.
Dragoslav Kovacevic, the brother of the Real Estate Administation, in 2008 founded the company “Geo Reper” for geodetic jobs, based in Danilograd, together with some Radovan Boskovic and his son Dragan. Since 2008 until today, this company several times changed the official pawners and executives, names and address, so in the end it is harder to link it to Dragan Kovacevic , the director of the Real Estate Administration, according to MANS’s Research center.
Commission after commission up to 15.000 Euros
Before he came as a head of the Real Estate Administration, Dragan Kovacevic changed the composition of the Commission for the issuance of licenses and obtaining authorizations for execution of geodetic works, and by the decision appointed himself as a member, and Radovan Boskovic as Deputy President of the Commission, despite the fact that both are in apparent conflict of interest because of the ownership interests they hold in the surveying companies. In addition, Kovacevic define, by a special decision, the amount of compensation received by the members of this committee, and according to MANS’s sources, this is just one of the many committees where Kovacevic is a member. According to data from the website of the Commission for conflict of interest, Kovacevic for 2013 reported an annual income of 15.000 euros as a member in different companies for licenses, supervision and evaluation. Until this year and his wife, Milunka Kovacevic reported the incomes from the Commission for the licenses, the assessments of real estate and others, but on the website was not mentioned hat was received on that basis.
So after the director’s brother, as a head of the ‘Geo Raper” was appointed one of the founders, Dragan Boskovic, and then taken back to Dragoslav Kovacevic. He was replaced from that position by a close relative of the wife of the director of the Real Estate Administration, Aleksandra Bubanja, who was employed in that company in the end of 2010. At the same time, in the company “Geo Reper” is employed and the son of the director of the Real Estate Administration, Danko Kovacevic. In a meantime, the company moved its location and changed name, so now it is located in Podgorica, with the name “Geo & Arh Projekt” Finally, the company is now registered only under Dragan Boskovic, who is also the only founder and CEO.
As it later turns out, this company thanks to Dragan Kovacevic received numerous valuable work with the Real Estate Administration.
One of these projects is “the project of creating Land registries in 18 municipalities in Plav “, worth 840,000 euros. Specifically, this work, in the public tender led by Dragan Kovacevic in 2011, got the Zgreb based company ” GEOFOTO”, which soon after signing the subcontract with the Real Estate Administration, hired as a contractor a company that is associated with Kovacevic, “Geo Raper”. Based on the data available by MANS, for the President of the Commission for the control of the contract performance, Radovan Bozovic has been named, father of the formal company’s owner “Geo Raper”, which appears as a subcontractor.
In a letter that the company “GEOFOTO” submitted to the Real Estate Administration director at that time Mico Orlandic, it is stated that Dragan Kovacevic, at that time the deputy of the director and the director of that project, had a positive opinion on the involvement of “Geo Raper” company.
The new company for staging the competition?
Aleksandra Bubanja, a close relative of Kovacevic’s wife after leaving the company “Geo Raper”, in the end of 2012, started a new company for surveying jobs “Geoana”, and its license to operate was issued by a new Commission, part of which has already been duo Dragan Kovacevic – Radovan Boskovic. Establishment of the companies between related parties, except for the possible money laundering, it ofter works for staging so-called competition, where a several companies owned by one person, or several connected people, sign up for tender, staging competition, ensuring that one company from “the network” always gets a job in the tender, warns the director of MANS’s Research center, Dejan Milovac.
The result of this project is that the company “Geofoto” never completed the job on the development of the Land register of the Plav municipality, but the contact with it was canceled, and a new tender for this project was announced in the beginning of this year.
Director of MANS’s Research center, Dejan Milovac, stated for DAN that this is one more example that MANS sees every day, and in which they were able to discover complex corruption schemes, thankfully to the data on personal information of people and companies.
“In this regard, we are particularly concerned by the fact that as the head of the Land Register is a person with whom are connected serious suspicions that harshly abused power for personal and for the benefits of others. Exactly Dragan Kovacevic, who likes to present himself in the media as the undisputed fighter against corruption, according to the data obtained by MANS, directly is responsible for numerous violations of the laws on Montenegrin Land Register and possible corruption. What is also warring is the fact that the staff like this after deletion of the identification numbers from the website of the Real Estate Administration, now has exclusive access to that data, and we believe that it is more possible that they are going to be abused by Kovacevic than MANS or any other civil society organization that is engaged in the fight against corruption, Milovac concluded.
