Yesterday, the Agency for Prevention of Corruption (APC) announced the decision based upon the initiative MANS had submitted against the President of the Municipality of Budva, Milo Božović, who has been ignoring the legal obligation to submit an income and assets statement for two years. On the other hand, for two years, until MANS filed the initiative, APC has been ignoring its obligation to apply the Law on Prevention of Corruption consistently and without delay.
MANS filed an initiative against Božović back in September last year for violating the legal obligation to submit regular annual income and assets statement to the Agency for Prevention of Corruption. Thus, according to the data available on the APC’s website, Božović did not submit regular income and assets statements he had during 2020 and 2021. Božović also failed to submit several extraordinary statements after leaving his old and entering new public positions during the mentioned two years.
Milo Božović was the manager of the Municipality of Budva from 2017 to 2020, and he was elected a member of the Budva Assembly several times. After the 2020 elections, he was elected a member of the Parliament of Montenegro, and in 2022, the board of commissioners elected him the President of the Municipality of Budva, thus, after the October elections, his term of office in that position was also confirmed by the Budva Parliament.
After each such change, Božović had a legal obligation to submit a special report on the state of assets and income after leaving the public office, i.e. starting a new term of office. In the last two years, the Agency failed to apply the Law on Prevention of Corruption in Božović’s case, until last year MANS submitted an initiative requesting that it finally be established that this public official has been violating this law for an extended period of time.
Data from the Budva cadastre show that Božović significantly increased his property compared to 2019, when he last reported it to APC, which this institution did not note at all.
The Agency for Prevention of Corruption has access to databases that enable it to track changes in the assets of public officials even without their official reports. The case of the Mayor of Budva is an excellent example of the fact that APC rarely and selectively uses the resources at its disposal, which results in a situation where certain public officials can increase their assets for years without fear of being sanctioned for not declaring them.
Such state when it comes to filing of the income and assets statements of Montenegrin public officials is a direct consequence of the lack of political will to genuinely start the institutional and legislative reform of the fight against corruption, especially when it comes to the work of the Agency for Prevention of Corruption, which is continuously labeled as biased and subject to political pressure.
Dejan Milovac
Director of the Investigative Centre
MANS
