In their response, the representatives of the Agency for Prevention of Corruption (APC) neither denied a single fact that MANS announced in yesterday’s statement, nor, unfortunately, did they announce what results in the fight against corruption recommended the Director of the Agency for Prevention of Corruption, Jelena Perović, for a special allowance in the amount of 30% of the monthly salary.
We hope that the special allowance granted to the director of APC was not “earned” by years-long ignoring of the judgments of the Administrative Court, which, based on MANS’ complaints, obliged Ms. Perović and her team to harmonise APC’ decisions with the law and regulations.
From September 2020 to February 2021, the Administrative Court passed four judgements based on the MANS’ complaints and annulled the decisions of the APC in the cases of President Milo Đukanović’s unreported property in Kočani and exotic trips to Dubai and Saint Tropez with a fellow DPS official, Branimir Gvozdenović.
In September 2021, another judgment of the Administrative Court was passed, ordering that the APC check the origin of President Đukanović’s watches worth millions.
For each of these judgments of the Administrative Court, APC had a deadline of up to 30 days to issue a new decision, but that never happened.
We have been waiting for more than six months for the APC to verify that the current Prime Minister, Dritan Abazović, received a gift in the form of paid travel expenses to Dubai, but the APC and Perović have not made a final decision in that case either.
This is only a part of the cases on the basis of which the international community concluded that the actions of the APC in cases of high-level corruption are selective, and that the results in that area are still insufficient.
When it comes to the monitoring of election campaigns and the financing of political entities, the experience from the last parliamentary elections has shown that the decisions of the APC, even when they are passed, do not produce any legal effect, or do they have a preventive effect on reducing corruption in that area. Thus, most of the biggest cases of electoral corruption were identified precisely by the civil sector and the media, and for the most part they remained unsanctioned precisely because of the “convenient” lack of action by the APC itself.
Everything that APC has done so far when it comes to conflict of interest, illicit enrichment of public officials, as well as the monitoring of election processes, points to the conclusion that radical reforms are necessary, but also that they cannot start by stimulating the leadership of APC for obvious inefficiency and partiality.
Finally, the latest decision on the intention of the Government of Montenegro to pay the leadership of the APC a special allowance became available on the Government’s website when it was restored at the beginning of this week, after which the response of MANS followed.
All other interpretations of the APC are just a continuation of the institution’s long-standing practice of responding to justified criticism with threats and persecution of opponents. Unfortunately for them, doing that cannot hide the obvious lack of sustainable results in the fight against corruption.
