MANS Executive Director Vanja Calovic Markovic today responded to Prime Minister Dusko Markovic’s invitation to a dialogue he launched several days ago.
Dear Mr. Marković,
MANS is always ready for a dialogue on promoting the fight against corruption and organized crime in order to establish the rule of law.
Thank you for your invitation, however, you are sending it only in the last months of your Government’s work, which in the meantime has made great steps back in precisely those areas you wish to discuss.
For over three years, your Government has been withholding important information from the public in order to prevent public scrutiny of its work, in particular the detection of top-level organized crime and corruption. You declared trade secrets all information on spending of hundreds of millions of Euros for the construction of the highway, but also information about the control that should be carried out by the state authorities, as well as enormous subsidies that the state gives to private companies. Thus, you have made it impossible to detect corruption of such scale that it cannot bypass the very top of the government, which has led not only to the outflow of large amounts of money into private pockets, but also to the irreversible destruction of the Tara River.
You declared classified all information on privatisation of 13 largest companies, you are hiding how much money you give to government-affiliated companies, and you are also declaring classified information on the manner you use the state property. At the same time, you have continued to pour millions of Euros into the pockets of privileged individuals who own small hydropower plants, at the expense of the quality of life of citizens in those areas and their environment. In the eve of the presidential election, you declared a state secret in what way you had spent millions of Euros on social assistance and numerous other benefits to individuals, i.e. voters.
Your Government has proposed legislation that encourages corruption instead of preventing it, so for three years we have been fighting to stop the regression of reforms instead of promoting them., At the proposal of the ruling party MPs, your Government accepted amendments to the Law on Free Access to Information, which make it possible for almost all information to be classified as trade secrets. Recently, the Government proposed new amendments to the Law that further restrict citizens’ rights to access information, in order to further hide corruption. In addition, draft of the new Law on Media further discourages those who wish to report corruption at the very top of the government by forcing investigative journalists to disclose their sources.
Earlier, you proposed, and the Parliament passed the Law on Spatial Planning and Construction of Structures, which centralized decision-making with enormous discretionary powers, which ultimately led to the resignation of the line minister precisely because of corruption. You also proposed the Law on Public Procurement that allowed an enormous part of citizens’ money to be spent through secret procurement, which directly encourages corruption at all levels.
You have ignored our proposals to improve legislation, criminalize illicit enrichment, corruption in privatization, public procurement and bankruptcy, so that the deficiencies of the legal framework would not be the reason that corruption goes unpunished. You also did not accept our recommendations regarding the management of temporarily and permanently seized property, so that the state would not pay millions of reparations to criminals who evade justice due to omissions of the judiciary.
You are now inviting us to a dialogue on reforms that cannot be implemented until the end of your term, and you have been avoiding or faking it for three years. You abolished the National Commission for the Fight against Corruption and Organized Crime, where representatives of competent institutions at the highest level discussed with the civil sector. You replaced it with working groups for Chapters 23 and 24 in which there are no decision makers, who hold sessions without the public, and where NGO representatives have only a formal role, but not access to key information. Although you have committed yourself to facilitating the participation of the non-governmental sector in the Privatization Council, that never happened. You have ignored our calls for a dialogue on highway construction, small hydropower plants and many other topics relevant to the fight against corruption.
Even when you seemingly allowed us to participate in decision-making, it turns out that the Government was trying to misuse us to gain legitimacy for decisions made behind closed doors. Our representatives in the working groups were denied basic information, decisions were made outside those bodies, but the Government representatives publicly claimed that the NGO sector had participated in the preparation of the legal solutions.
However, we believe that it is our civic duty to persistently try to contribute to the implementation of reforms, even when there are minimal conditions and minimal political willingness to do so, but we will not accept to only play a role in any process. Therefore, we will accept your invitation for a dialogue, but we expect you to show a concrete willingness to both improve the legislation and the practice of your Government, and create the conditions for public control of its work and spending of taxpayers’ money, especially in the election period.
Vanja Ćalović Marković, Ecexutive Director
