Ministry of Agriculture and Finance, Investment and Development Fund, Municipality Bar, Bijelo Polje, and Kolasin drastically violated the Law on free access to information hiding data on spending money on the recent local elections, shows the latest analysis of the Research Center of MANS, which was made on the basis of documentation requested from the beginning of the year from state institutions at the local and national level.
We are talking exactly about those Government agencies and municipalities for which MANS found that they abused state resources for electoral purposes in recent years, headed by the officials of the Democratic Party of Socialists who are suspected of serious fraud while abusing their office power, but also for the connection with structures of organized crime.
So the Ministry of Agriculture earlier submitted documentation that MANS requested on the basis of the Law on free access to information, but it stopped with it at the beginning of this year, after we, based on the analysis, published a few articles that discovered misuses of funds of that Government departments in electoral purposes.
In fact, the Research Center of MANS on the examples of subsidy payments to the farmers, credit allocation through MIDAS program and pumping money to municipalities for the so-called rural infrastructure in local communities presented a scheme that the Ministry of Agriculture uses in the pre-election periods in order for the DPS to make a stronger political influence on the ground.
The head of the Ministry of Agriculture is a controversial Petar Ivanovic, who has been associated with drug boss Darko Saric, and who was very agile on the terrain before the local elections, so it is not surprising why we are deprived of the specific data that should show how the Ministry spent taxpayers’ money before May 25th, actually on the day when in the majority of municipalities elections were held.
The Investment Development Fund (IDF) stopped to submit documentation to MANS after we published a serious of articles on how this institution in the pre-election periods illegally allocated loans to privileged companies, and also on how the Fund its overall business policy creates in a way that the loans are granted to the companies that are directly associated with the top of the DPS.
From recently as the head of the IDF is the representative of the DPS and one of the actors in the affair “Snapshot” Zoran Vuckovic, and that how much he does not care of law respect the best illustrate the fact that the loan contracts were rejected with the explanation that they did not get the consent of the other contracting party, although it is taxpayers’ money that is given.
Thus, to a serious of tycoon and companies associated with the DPS, such as “Mesopromet, “Hidroenergija Montenegro”, “Goranovic”, “Celebic” and others, loans were approved from the state budget, and Vuckovic asked approval of private companies to submit contracts. On these kind of decisions MANS appealed to the Agency for the protection of data and free access to information, because the public has an undeniable interest to know to whom and under what conditions money that belongs to all citizens is given.
And the Ministry of Finance until today hides data on spending money from state treasury, while orders for payments declared as secret, which is clearly a confirmation of suspicions that from the public eye it should be hidden to whom the money was transferred right before the recent elections.
When it comes to local governments, Municipality Bar withheld data, actually leaving Mayor Zarko Pavicevic, whose suspicious business with elements of organized crime investigates prosecution based on the complaint by MANS, and also Bijelo Polje and Kolasin, actually their former mayors Aleksandar Zuric and Darko Brajuskovic. All three of them are prominent officials of the DPS.
All the above additionally points to the necessity of further need for the Parliament of Montenegro to forms a special body to deal with the control of implementation of the election laws, and according to which the state and municipal authority would be obligated to submit the necessary documentation, because broken confidence in the electoral process must recover, and the Parliament is one of the latest addresses invited to do that.
MANS
