Today, NGO MANS submitted to the Agency for Prevention of Corruption (APC) requests to initiate proceedings against Dritan Abazović, Deputy Prime Minister of Montenegro and Filip Adžić, his advisor, because they did not refuse a gift in the form of paid travel and accommodation expenses in Dubai and Abu Dhabi (UAE) in December last year.
Namely, at that time, Abazović and Adžić were in the United Arab Emirates at the expense of Mohammed Al Shaibani, who is the head of the Ruler’s Court and the executive director of the Investment Corporation of Dubai (ICD), a company that owns Porto Montenegro in Tivat.
Pursuant to the Law on Prevention of Corruption, public officials are prohibited from accepting gifts except for protocol and appropriate gifts – to the value of € 50, and especially gifts in connection with the exercise of public function. According to the provisions of the cited law, Abazović and Adžić had to refuse a gift in the form of paid travel and accommodation expenses, and make a written report, which would then be submitted to the public authority, in this case the Government of Montenegro i.e. the Secretariat-General of the Government of Montenegro.
Abazović and Adžić not only did not refuse the gift, but also did not report it to the Secretariat-General, which recently handed over the records of gifts to APC, in which no trip to the UAE was mentioned.
Deputy Prime Minister Abazović and his first associate refused to answer questions of the MANS Investigative Centre regarding the value of the gifts they received, and what were the motives of their host to finance their trip and stay in the Emirates in this way.
On the other hand, APC failed to initiate proceedings on its own, which is clearly provided for in Article 20, paragraph 1 of the Law on Prevention of Corruption: “Based on the knowledge that a public official has received a gift contrary to the law, the Agency shall carry out the procedure in accordance with this Law.”
Due to all of the above, MANS has officially submitted requests to APC to initiate proceedings, and we expect the Agency to promptly investigate these allegations and call for a statement from Abazović and Adžić.
Exotic trips of the highest state officials at the expense of third parties is something we had the opportunity to see during the rule of the previous regime, as well as the practice that the competent APC does not prosecute such violations of the law. Thus, the public is still waiting for the final decisions of the APC on the issue of unreported trips of Milo Đukanović and Branimir Gvozdenović to Dubai and Saint Tropez, which was financed by the fugitive businessman Duško Knežević.
Deputy Prime Minister Abazović has not yet told the public the real reasons for his trip to the Emirates, or how much the stay at the expense of a company that has business interests in Montenegro cost. The public also still does not have answers to the questions what were Abazović’s motives for accepting the gift, for which he must have known was a violation of the Law on Prevention of Corruption.
In this way, MANS once again calls on the APC to investigate without delay all the circumstances related to Abazović’s trip to the Emirates, but also to finally adopt decisions in similar cases that have been open before the Agency for years.
MANS
