For more than a year and a half, the Secretariat-General of the Government has kept secret the information about the real reason for the alleged business trip of the President of Montenegro, Milo Đukanović, to Paris. The changes at the head of that institution did not lead to a change in the practice of withholding information. However, the latest ruling of the Administrative Court on the lawsuit of the NGO MANS could force the new government to finally publish documentation on Đukanović’s mysterious flight to Paris.
In mid-January last year, at the airport in Podgorica, MANS investigators photographed an official state vehicle, Mercedes Maybach, waiting for passengers from the two-hour flight from Paris to Podgorica. President Milo Đukanović and his wife were on the state aircraft, and footage from a restaurant in Miami showed that Paris was just a stopover to the United States, where they spent the New Year’s holidays.
MANS asked the Secretariat-General of the Government of Montenegro for more detailed information on what was the official reason for Đukanović’s flight to Paris, but the institution refused to publish that information, justifying it with security reasons.
After that, Đukanović indirectly confirmed spending the New Year’s holidays in Miami, but he refused to tell the public what type of state job he did in Paris, arguing that it is a matter of which the public should not be informed.
The Special State Prosecutor’s Office and the Agency for Prevention of Corruption agreed that Đukanović’s state job should remain secret, and they rejected MANS’s reports on the basis of this statement by Đukanović.
After the formation of the new Government of Montenegro and the change in the head of the Secretariat-General, MANS tried to get information about the controversial flight from the new government, but without success.
In early July, the Administrative Court annulled the decision of the previous Secretariat-General, stating that the institution had failed to prove that publishing data on Đukanović’s flight would jeopardize Montenegro’s security, defense, monetary and economic interests.
– Mere reference to the secrecy mark “INTERNAL”, which refers to the work of a certain authority, does not provide an explanation for the actions of the defendant authority. In the specific case, the decision in question does not contain these reasons, but only states that these are data that may pose a security risk to the protected persons. As there are no more specific reasons on how the disclosure of data would have detrimental consequences for the work of the authority, such act is not given in accordance with the Law on Classified Information and cannot be the basis for any action on the request for free access to information, the judgment of the Administrative Court states.
Although more than a month has passed since the judgment, MANS states that the new Secretariat-General has not yet published data on Đukanović’s flight.
Unfortunately, the Secretariat-General continues the practice of withholding data from Montenegrin citizens, so in addition to data on Đukanović ‘s flights, this institution still refuses to disclose data in what way top state officials, primarily Prime Minister Zdravko Krivokapić and Deputy Prime Minister Dritan Abazović, use the state plane.
From December last year until today, MANS has sent several requests to the Secretariat-General regarding individual flights of Krivokapić and Abazović, but so far, all of them have been ignored without any explanation.
MANS
