Within the power network
In response to our question on whether he thought he is in conflict of interest, since he decides on the issuance of accreditation for institutions of which he is the founder as member of the Government Council, Professor Dragan Vukcevic briefly said: ” The Rector of the University of Montenegro sat in the Council when University courses of study were accredited.”
Montenegro will soon get its third University, with a seat in Donja Gorica. The owners are former professors of the state university Veselin Vukotic and Dragan Vukcevic, DPS President and Prime Minister in his fifth term Milo Djukanovic, and a businessman Tomislav Celebic. Long-time friends, business associates in many state projects and government bodies, they have recently opened the fifth faculty, which gives them legal ground for submitting a request for accreditation and licensing of the university.
As in the case of five faculties, of whom the last one is the Faculty of Arts, due to start work in September, the accreditation will be obtained from the Government Council for Higher Education, one of whose members is its co-founder Dragan Vukcevic. Accreditation and verification of adherence to requirements regarding the syllabus will be followed by the issuance of license, to be signed by Djukanovic’s Minister of Education and Science in his second term Sreten Škuletić.
Faculty is the first official business
Although he stated in various media interviews that he has never dealt with business while he held a state office, Djukanovic founded five companies in two years. In autumn 2006, he replaced his Prime Minister’s position with membership in the Parliament and announced that he intended to devote himself to business. His first business enterprise was “Univerzitats”, and immediately afterwards he opened a private faculty. One of the companies Kapital Invest is also the buyer of shares of the First Bank (Prva banka). According to data, he is also the co-founder of the Global Montenegro Company, which owns land near Budva.
According to the data from the website of the Commission for Conflict of Interest, monthly income of Djukanovic family in 2008 amounted to 13,663 Euros, and the family budget was mostly contributed by his son Blazo. Milo’s heir earned 11,000 Euros per month by leasing out office premises, which were given to him by his uncle Aco, and then rented them for the needs of the First Bank. The salary of Milo Djukanovic in 2008 amounted to 1,227 Euros, and of his wife Lydia to 1436 euros . In his last property record, Djukanovic only reported an apartment of 187 square meters, and the salary as his sole income. Profits gained from companies where he owns shares or which he owns were not reported.
“We have not yet filed a request for accreditation and licensing. We are waiting to get a decision on the fifth faculty, which has been signed. We will then submit a request to the Council for Accreditation of the University and to the Ministry of Education and Science for a license,” says Professor Dragan Vukcevic, who is apppointed as Dean of the Faculty of Law in Donja Gorica.
In response to our question on whether he thought he is in conflict of interest, since he decides on the issuance of accreditation for institutions of which he is the founder as member of the Government Council, Professor Dragan Vukcevic briefly said: ” The Rector of the University of Montenegro sat in the Council when University courses of study were accredited.” After all, I am not the one to decide on such matters, but the Committee established by the Council which assesses the fulfilment of conditions.
Professor of the State University and President of the Council for Higher Education Radenko Pejovic, who succeeded Vukcevic in this position, refused to make any statements on the matter. Asked whether the Council has ever reacted to the fact that the above-mentioned private entrepreneurs are recruiting students by falsely presenting themselves as University, Pejovic told Monitor weekly three months ago that, “Donja Gorica University does not officially exist, nor has received initial accreditation.”
“The public has so far had the opportunity to learn that the UDG started working without the required documents, ranging from those related to the building where its seat is located, to those related to accreditation. The damage was primarily inflicted on the students who were misled into enrolling in the university, that could not have borne that name until the fifth university unit had been established, which has only recently been done, said the Executive Director of the NGO Center for Civic Education Daliborka Uljarević in her interview to the programme Under the Magnifying Glass.
She estimates that for years there has been subversive activity to undermine the State University in different ways, one of which is reflected in the fact that some lecturers of the UDG who have enjoyed significant benefits from the State University (UCG) and from numerous institutions of the system have participated in the establishment of the private university, and still continued to teach at UCG, contrary to its rules. “It is clear that this is a situation in which a few powerful individuals are essentially permitted to do as they please, while the law is enforced on those who are deemed unfit, as a form of revenge,” says Uljarević. She adds that UDG may exceed other educational institutions with the excellence of students it produces, but it will have a hard time erasing the shadow cast over the process of its foundation and ownership structure.
“These are the people who gave their blind benediction and encouraged all deviations brought upon the Montenegrin society by the transition, which Vukotic and his clique used to build up their image,” assesses Branka Bosnjak, Ph.D., Presidency member of the Movement for Changes. “There is a whole “army” of personnel which has been recruited by Vukotic for years, who mentored their Ph.D. and Master’s theses, and that “army” is quite numerous. It includes ministers, former and current, their assistants and advisors in various ministries, in his agencies, commissions and institutes. And as you can see, regardless of the fact that Vukotic trained them in business and entrepreneurship, they are nevertheless deployed to state positions on account of his ties. He knows where the power is and where they can come in handy. And the level of their skills is reflected in the state of the Montenegrin economy.”
Veselin Vukotic, longtime Vice President of the Privatization Council, chaired by former and current Prime Minister, after several decades of working at the State University, has established the Faculty of International Economics, Finance and Business and the Faculty of Law, in cooperation with the above-mentioned partners. Academician Dragan Vukcevic directly went into private business from the state Faculty of Law, where he had also been appointed as Dean, and the Head of Postgraduate Studies. At the time of accreditation of the first two faculties, Vukcevic was officially the President of the Government Council for Higher Education.
Vukotic was the main promoter of the concept of economic neoliberalism in Montenegro, the creator, and often a participant in the privatization of about 80 percent of Montenegrin economy. Former professor of the state-owned Faculty, and as he then liked to boast, the founder “of Montenegrin School of Economics”, after going off to a private university, he “took along” his memories of the Montenegrin School of Economics and the event entitled “Christmas Economic Debates”, dedicated to the late Professor Bozidar Bosko Gluscevic.
In his interview to the programme Under the Magnifying Glass, the Dean of the Faculty of Economics in Podgorica, Milorad Jovovic said that, nevertheless, he did not believe that Vukotic incurred damage to the Faculty by going away, and “dragging along” a number of lecturers and “taking away” the traditional Christmas Economic Debates.
“Objectively speaking, this was something that was Vukotic’s idea. I can compare it with a situation when a TV host moves to another media company, and takes along his original programme. We are not even damaged in terms of personnel, since only a few people went away with him,” says Jovovic.
Asked to give his comment on the position of the state University in a situation in which the Prime Minister also owns five competitive private faculties, Jovovic claims that he feels more “the misunderstanding on the part of the State University than on the part of the state.”
Lawsuit, bank loan and fireworks
In September 1, 2008 Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic officially inaugurated the newly constructed building of the future University of Donja Gorica, on a land that was under a legal dispute. The inauguration was attended by almost all Government ministers, politicians of the ruling party, the Head of Police Veselin Veljovic and Director of the Agency for National Security Dusko Markovic, President of the Constitutional Court and Professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences Milan Markovic, Rector of the University of Montenegro Predrag Miranović and numerous public figures from the world of business, sports, culture, etc. The UDG website published that guests who attended the event “were invited to see the future of Montenegrin students, through the vision” that its founders had. It was stated that a book entitled “Dangerous Words” was built into the foundations of the building, and that “the most direct intention of such an act was to encourage the vitality of spirit, inventiveness and creativity of students.”
Anyway, the construction of the building was begun without a building permit, which could not be released due to a legal dispute that the Municipality initiated against the investors, i.e. enterprises Celebic and INIS Marko Radovic. The capital city filed a lawsuit against Celebic Company for a restitution of a total of 113,000 square meters of land in Donja Gorica, which the Company acquired from “Marko Radovic”, claiming it was a land that had been given to the furniture factory for use.
According to cadastral records, cadastral parcel 3873-2, area 12,038 square meters, as part of an urban parcel on which the facility was built, is the property of the Univerzitats Company, which was placed under mortgage as security for a loan worth six million Euros. A contract with the Montenegrin Commercial Bank (Crnogorska komercijalna banka) was signed on 26 February 2007, with a repayment period of 12 years.
“During Senate sessions we wage battles to prove that it is not logical that some professors teach with us and with competitive institutions. Also, there were many situations in which some of our ideas were blocked by the Senate. I am not a supporter of conspiracy theories, we are probably just dealing with misunderstanding of the situation and the fact that we cannot remain with our arms crossed after the appearance of a competitive institution that is pushing its way forward,” says Jovovic.
Apart from his activities with the Faculty of Economics, Professor Veselin Vukotic has coordinated for the Government activities related to economic reforms, from trade and economic freedoms to macroeconomics and statistics and at the same time he chaired the Privatization Council. Although he was suspected and accused of abuse of office, he was in charge of coordinating activities on the adoption and implementation of the Law on Conflict of Interest and the Law on Anticorruption.
Along with the current Minister of Economic Development Branko Vujovic, Vukotic was charged with violation of the Law on Public Procurement, infraction of regulations when engaging lawyer Mark Harrison as an advisor in the privatization procedure of Kotor “Jugopetrol” for a fee of three million Euros, only to be engaged later on in drafting amendments to that regulation.
With a group of associates, Vukotic has founded the Center for Strategic Studies and Prognoses, which, despite the existence of the State Statistics Office (MONSTAT) has a monopoly in producing statistical indicators for many Government documents, the Strategy for Development and Poverty Reduction and the Strategy for Refugees and Displaced Persons to name but few. He has founded the Center for Entrepreneurship with Petar Ivanovic, Ph.D. in Economics, founder and Vice President of the Montenegro Business Alliance and the current Director of the Government Agency for Promotion of Foreign Investment.
Jointly with Zoran Đikanović, the current President of the Securities Commission, Vukotic was suspected of abuse of office and illegal activities earlier last year, in an attempt to privatize Beko Department Store in downtown Podgorica. The charges were dismissed after expertise conducted for the needs of the court by his colleagues of the Faculty of Economics. And the cooperation between Vukotic and Đikanović continued.
Đikanović completed his Master’s Degree under Professor Vukotic in postgraduate studies of Entrepreneurial Economics at the state-owned Faculty of Economics. He took his Ph.D. at the same faculty in 2006 with the thesis entitled “Regulation of the Capital Market in Montenegro – Analysis of the Impact of Regulations on Market Development” under the mentorship of Professor Vukotic, who was also the member of the review commission.
In 1995, four years before taking his Master’s Degree, Đikanović began working as an Associate Professor at Faculty of Economics, in a course “Money and Capital Markets”. Moreover, one year after obtaining his Master’s degree, Đikanović became a member of the Securities Commission in December 2000, and only two years later was elected President. Previously, from 1996 to 2000, he worked as Director of the Monte Adria Broker, a joint financial and stock broker intermediary, which was founded by Veselin Vukotic. Until November 2000 he was the coordinator in the operation group for Mass Voucher Privatization, which has established by the Privatization Council.
At that time, Vukotic’s daughter Milica also took her Ph.D. degree, and currently works with her father at the Faculty in their property, where she is awarded generous appanage as a Council member with the Agency for Electronic Communications. Another Vukotic’s Ph.D. candidate, Maja Drakic, left the state faculty immediately upon obtaining the academic title of a docent and moved to his faculty. Petar Ivanovic has also followed in the footsteps of his professor.
We should not forget to mention the Minister of Finance Igor Luksic, who received his Ph.D. at the Faculty of Economics in Podgorica, and his mentor was Vukotic. Today, he teaches at his Faculty.
