In March and April of this year alone, the Government of Montenegro declared as many as 160 individual transactions secret, thus continuing the practice of concealing data on the state budget spending during election campaigns and opening up space for abuses.
The practice of concealing budget transactions was previously introduced by the Government of Duško Marković, only to be abolished by the administration of Zdravko Krivokapić. The old practice of concealing data on budget spending continued with the arrival of Prime Minister Dritan Abazović at the head of the Government of Montenegro, precisely during the pre-election campaign period.
The Law on Financing of Political Entities and Election Campaigns obliges the Government of Montenegro and other state institutions to make data on spending during the election campaign public, precisely for the reason of preventing the abuse of state resources for party purposes, as we have witnessed in the past three decades.
The practice that was re-established after DPS left power implies that individual transactions are deleted from the data on spending in such a way that it is not possible to find out how much money is involved, to whom they were paid, what they were used for, and even from which budget account the payment was made.
In this way, in March 2023, the Government of Montenegro marked 82 transactions as secret, and additional 78 in April. During those two months, as many as 84 transactions of the National Security Agency and 51 transactions of the Ministry of Defence were hidden from the public.
In addition, data on the spending of the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Economy and the Ministry of Finance are also hidden from citizens.
It is particularly interesting that the Ministry of Economy conceals spending from programme lines related to the harmonization of national legislation and the implementation of administrative procedures, while the Ministry of Finance conceals data on servicing the national debt, and the Ministry of Interior on procurement for the needs of the police.
This behaviour of the Government of Montenegro is a direct consequence of the lack of political will to make the electoral process, especially its financial part, more transparent and prevent the continuation of abuse of state resources for political purposes.
Concealing data on the spending of state money, especially in the pre-election period, is a huge incentive for corruption and is a practice that, first of all, the parties that make up the executive power, must abandon without delay ahead of the upcoming extraordinary parliamentary elections.
MANS
