Just a week before this year’s parliamentary elections, only six records on conducted control can be found on the website of the Agency for Prevention of Corruption (APC), which speaks volumes about to what extent the control conducted by this institution will contribute to keeping the political campaign clean.
According to the Law on Financing of Political Entities and Election Campaigns, APC is obliged to post all records on performed controls on its website. The records available to the public show that APC officials, since the beginning of the election campaign, spent only one day on the field and that they controlled the municipalities of Budva, Kotor, Šavnik and Žabljak, public company “Morsko dobro” (Coastal Zone Management Agency) and the state-owned company “HG Budva Riviera”.
APC conducted first controls on August 10, as stated in the records, so the question arises as to what this institution has been doing since June 20, when the election campaign officially began.
The extent to which such controls have been effective is also shown by the fact that they were announced several days in advance, and on the day of the control, APC officials visited the premises of the institutions and stated that “there was no displayed materials of political parties.”
The analysis of the records on control shows that APC relied to the greatest extent on the statements of officials and the mentioned companies, whose accuracy was not verified or it was not possible, because all controls that APC carried out so far have been announced in advance.
APC officials also controlled pre-election employment in HG Budva Riviera, although the company is not reporting entity of that part of the Law on Financing of Political Entities.
Of particular concern are the criteria according to which APC has decided to control precisely these institutions, especially taxpayers whose budgets are negligible in relation to the budgets of, for example, the Ministries of Economy, Labour and Social Welfare, or even Agriculture.
It is not clear on the basis of which criteria APC officials deal with employment in HG Budva Riviera, and not for example in the Armed Forces of Montenegro, for which we have all seen that there is very concrete evidence that it drastically violates the Law on Financing Political Entities and Election Campaigns.
Moreover, APC does not deal with millions worth of payments from the so-called third package of socio-economic measures that the Government launched in the middle of the election campaign, but it is interested in how much money the Municipality of Šavnik receives for renting its premises to political parties.
Unfortunately, previous conduct of APC has shown that the practice in that institution is not far behind the one established by the former director, Sreten Radonjić, and that it continues to contribute to the worsening of the conditions for holding the upcoming elections.
Everything that APC has done so far to control the pre-election process was done under public pressure, after MANS, not APC ex officio, checked and reported certain media, analysed donations to parties, and spending of the state budget.
Even the publishing of the records on control came after MANS urged it to do so. However, no statistics that the Agency is trying to produce at the very end of the campaign can hide the previous catastrophic results of this institution.
MANS
