Today, MANS filed a criminal complaint to the Special State Prosecutor’s Office against Milo Đukanović, the President of Montenegro and the President of the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS), as well as against his party, all due to suspicion that they had created a scheme of inserting money of unknown origin into the official financial flows of that party in order to finance 2016 election campaign.
Namely, MANS Investigative Centre recently revealed another scheme of inserting money of unknown origin into the financial flows of the campaign for the elections held in 2016, when employees of Podgorica’s Public Utility Company “Čistoća” and “Vodovod i kanalizacija” (water supply and sewage system), as well as the city’s Fire Department, donated almost 40 thousand Euros to DPS in August and September of that year.
City service employees usually donated money on the same day, in cash and in the same branch of Societe Generale bank (now Podgorička banka) in Podgorica, which was also previously used by now well-known DPS donors from Vrela Ribnička, but also by 22 high-ranking party officials, who one after the other and on the same day paid alleged voluntary donations for the needs of running the campaign. Local officials and members of DPS from the municipal boards also helped their party in an organized way and according to the described pattern.
The fact that with the help of “voluntary” contributions from citizens DPS collected as much as €680 thousand for 2016 elections had to be a serious signal for the State Prosecutor’s Office then, which should have opened an investigation into the origin of that money ex officio. However, while the State Prosecutor’s Office remained silent, the media and the NGO sector revealed scandals one after another. Nevertheless, each of these scandals is yet to be accompanied by an adequate reaction from the prosecutors.
On the other hand, Đukanović continues to insist on the statement that NGO sector and the media are to blame for Montenegro’s bad image in the international community, and that they are causing overall decline of Montenegrin society. It is understandable to us that Đukanović criticizes the filing of criminal complaints because it is them that led to the revelation of his and corruption affairs of his party and his closest associates.
MANS cannot be blamed for the fact that his secretary Slavoljub Stijepović was caught with an envelope of dirty money in his pocket, or for his inept hiding of a company registered in Cyprus. We know that Đukanović’s problem is that we caught DPS’ activists buying ID cards and discovered millions of Euros of state money that DPS misuses prior to every election, or that most mayors from his party are now held responsible for serious acts of corruption.
After the “Envelope” affair broke out, explaining how his party recorded donations, Đukanović himself confirmed the existence of “black funds” that finance DPS election campaigns:
“Everything that was done ended up at the appropriate address in DPS, i.e. in the accounting department. It was carefully recorded there, and the reports were made for the state authorities in the form that those authorities asked for – whether they asked for this or that donations to be entered there, I don’t know exactly, because that is not a part of my work”, Đukanović said at the time.
The fact that a good part of MANS’s criminal complaints has not been processed yet, including those for political corruption that clearly point to him as the organizer of the corruption scheme, is not due to lack of evidence, but primarily due to deeply politicized prosecutorial organization and captured institutions.
As such, they are sending a clear message that political corruption in Montenegro certainly pays off and that money of suspicious origin is still worth more than the right of citizens to freely decide who will run this country.
MANS
