The fact that the Agency for Prevention of Corruption has the data does not mean that the citizens, the media or the civil sector will receive it in accordance with the Law on Free Access to Information in the manner they requested it.
Thus, the request of the Network for Affirmation of NGO Sector (MANS), which requested a decision on the forming of a Working Group for determining and compiling a list of public offices and reporting entities to the Law on Prevention of Corruption, was recently rejected.
In the decision, the Agency confirmed that it had a decision on the appointment of 11 members of the Working Group, but that it could not send it electronically because the document was already available to the public on the notice board in the institution’s premises.
Journalist from “Vijesti” made a direct insight into the decision in the premises of the Agency.
However, she did not find the decision on the website of the Agency for Prevention of Corruption.
According to that document, the Working Group was formed in September 2021, there is no term of work, it has 11 members, while the amount of compensation they receive was defined by a special decision. Since then, according to information of MANS and “Vijesti”, around 80,000 euros has been spent on allowances for the work of this body alone.
Milovac: An obstacle to the effective fight against corruption
Director of the MANS Investigative Centre Center, Dejan Milovac, told “Vijesti” that the manner in which the Agency rejected access to information regarding the Working Group is another example of how that institution “promotes itself as one of the obstacles to the effective fight against corruption, and an example of how a transparent and responsible public institution is not supposed to look like”.
“The purpose of the Law on Free Access to Information is to provide citizens and other interested parties with unimpeded and efficient access to information held by state institutions. What the Agency shows by this example is the intention to deliberately conceal or make access to information difficult, particularly to that which needs to increase the transparency of the work of that institution”, Milovac points out.
He reminds that MANS requested from the Agency the document on the basis of which the Working Group was formed.
Milovac: APC is an obstacle to the fight against corruption Photo: Boris Pejović
“It is a document that exists in electronic form which the Agency could have published on its website without any difficulty. Instead, the Agency informed us that the document was published publicly – on the notice board in the premises of that institution. In practice, this means that instead of accessing that document online, every interested citizen would have to personally come to that institution and get information about its content”, Milovac emphasizes.
In his words, this manner of “free access” to information is “something that the Agency wants to promote as a common practice, to the detriment of the public interest and the public’s right to know, regarding which MANS will certainly file a complain to the competent authorities”.
“All the more so because the public has the right to know how much money was spent on the work of the aforementioned working group and who its members are.”
Who is in the Working Group and for what money
According to the document, the head of the Working Group is Assistant Director Nina Paović, while the members are the Director Jelena Perović, member of the Agency Council Momčilo Radulović, as well as employees of that institution: Boris Vukašinović, Jasmina Maraš, Marina Mićunović, Marko Škerović, Veljo Brajković, Milena Kustudić, Stefan Radunović, Snežana Đuretić and Milena Lekić.
”Data from the annual reports on the implementation of the Agency’s budget for 2021 and 2022 show that so far, as much as 73 thousand euros has been spent on allowances for the members of this working group. The Working Group was formed in September 2021 by the decision of director Perović, who appointed herself as one of the 11 members of the working group, at whose head she appointed her first associate, Nina Paović. Apart from the two of them, a member of the Agency Council, Momčilo Radulović, is part of the working group. The data from the property records for 2021, which are available on the Agency’s website, show that the amount of the monthly allowance was 400 euros per member of the working group”, Milovac points out.
Bearing in mind that the term of office of the Working Group is not fixed, and that the allowance, according to reports on the assets and income of individual members, is 400 euros per month, from September 2021 to March 1 this year, i.e. in 18 months, 79,200 euros was spent.
The preliminary deadline broken, the justification is questionable
“In 2022, the Working Group continued to work on the creation of the mentioned list of public officials, and according to the claims of the director of the Agency, Jelena Perović, the preliminary list should have been completed in January of this year,” the Director of the MANS Investigative Centre points out. Milovac also reminds that “the work of the Working Group, as well as the funds allocated for it, was also criticized by some members of the Agency Council at the end of last year”.
“At that time, it was noted that these are enormous allocations that are not proportionate to the requirements of the work that the Working Group deals with. It is also noted that the work “could have been completed much earlier with a much better outline of public officials at the local and state level”, and that the duration of the working group calls into question the justification of its existence. The Agency annually spends around 100,000 euros on various types of ‘other income’,” Milovac reminded.
Source: Vijesti
