SNS-related allegations of crime and corruption

The logo of the Serbian Progressive Party

The Serbian Progressive Party (Serbian: Српска напредна странка, romanized: Srpska napredna stranka; abbr. СНС or SNS) is widely alleged to be connected to crime and corruption, and play a significant role in the erosion of rule of law in Serbia and its drift towards authoritarianism.

Freedom House's annual Nations in Transit report from early 2020 reported that due to democratic backsliding, Serbia was no longer a democracy (as it had been classified since 2003) and had become a hybrid regime, in the "gray zone" between "democracies and pure autocracies". The report cited "years of increasing state capture, abuse of power, and strongman tactics employed" by the Serbian president, Aleksandar Vučić. "Although the current SNS-led government came to power in 2012 promising to battle Serbia’s widespread corruption, the problem appears to have worsened, not improved, in the years since."

University of Gothenburg's V-DEM institute Deputy Director Anna Luhmann said that "the indexes of liberal democracy" have drastically deteriorated in Serbia, from 0.53 in 2009 to 0.25 in 2019, ranking it 139th of 179 countries surveyed. This result labeled Serbia an "electoral autocracy", “mainly due to the government's media censorship”, but also “a reduced space for the work of civil societies and academic institutions” and “the concern over the quality of the election system”.

Various media organizations owned by people close to the party have been sold to the state-owned Telekom for prices ten times higher than their estimated worth, effectively transferring public money into the hands of several individuals and placing them into government control. One of the most significant examples is the purchase of Kopernikus Corporation, which was sold for 195.5 million euros, many times higher than what experts estimate its value to be. Other examples include Radijus Vektor, which sold for 108 million euros; Wireless Media, sold for 38 million euros; and various acquisitions of minor cable television and internet providers (such as Avcom d.o.o, Belgrade, Radijus Vektor d.o.o, Belgrade, Masko d.o.o, Belgrade BPP Ing d.o.o and Grocka).

The aforementioned acquisitions worsened Telekom's financial situation, and led the company to issue bonds worth 23.5 billion dinars to refinance debts. The Serbian Anti-Corruption Council, however, remained silent. In 2017, Vučić labeled N1, the main independent media organization in Serbia, a "Luxembourg TV with American capital" and a "CIA-controlled TV".

Belgrade Waterfront

The Belgrade Waterfront construction mega-project in central Belgrade attracted further controversy in mid-September 2018 when two workers fell to their deaths from the 22nd floor of a building under construction. According to a report by Equal Times, "the men working illegally were sent away by their bosses and employers, as they didn’t have the proper paperwork".

Five days later, Vučić, who has been named "a leading champion" of the Belgrade Waterfront megaproject ever since he announced it in 2012, suggested that "in the United States a window washer dies every ten seconds". He apologized for the statement after the claim was discovered to have come from the satirical news website The Onion.

The project's ownership and profit was split, with the supposed investor Eagle Hills Properties receiving 68% and the Serbian government receiving 32%. The entire contract was kept secret and is linked with the corruption of government officials. Some critics have asked whether 4 billion euros of foreign direct investment were real, said that the Abu Dhabi-based investor did not participate in the megaproject at all, and that the project was actually used for money laundering. Local architect Ljubica Slavković commented that "A megalomaniac project backed by the promise of Abu Dhabi money is forcefully pushed forward by sidestepping laws and ignoring existing urban fabric, in order to secure the future identity of Serbia and its capital."

On 24 April 2016, unidentified men wearing balaclavas stormed the Belgrade quarter of Savamala in the middle of the night on Hercegovacka Street and demolished the houses and facilities located there. Savamala has since become a big construction site where the Belgrade Waterfront is being developed, also dubbed a “project of national importance” by the Serbian authorities. Although nearly completed, the Belgrade Waterfront towers are still mainly empty and the apartments there are sold at high prices.

The people who had lived in Savamala before it was demolished are resettled and live in other parts of the city. However, none of them want to publicly speak to the media, because they fear that they will have problems with the new accommodation they have been given in exchange for demolished houses.

In June 2016, the then-Prime Minister, Vučić, accused the top officials in Belgrade of being behind the demolition in Savamala. Marija Mali, the ex-wife of Finance Minister Sinisa Mali, who was the Belgrade mayor at the time, said in an interview for KRIK that her husband had told her that he had orchestrated the entire demolition of "some little shacks to remove clutter for the construction of the capital project". She also claimed that he had become violent since gaining political power, that he physically attacked her in the same month when the demolition occurred, and that he described it as a usual event. In particular, Marija asserted that Sinisa had said: "I had a problem, some people did not want to move out. I organized the action of cleansing. People came in the middle of a night, they kind of ravaged something there. I didn't do anything terrible, but, you know, I organized it all, I orchestrated the action." He later denied these accusations.

Disputes over the nature of this project have led to large-scale protests in Belgrade and a new citizens' association, dubbed Do not let Belgrade d(r)own (Serbian: Не да(ви)мо Београд).

Murder of Oliver Ivanovic

On Tuesday, 16 January 2018, Oliver Ivanovic was about to enter his office when an Opel Astra stopped behind him and a passenger fired six bullets into his back.

The Special Prosecution Office of Kosovo in early December 2019 filed an indictment against six persons (including a police officer, Markovic) as accomplices in the crime. It also named two controversial Serbian businessmen—Zvonko Veselinovic and Milan Radoicic—to have masterminded the murder. None of them are, however, available to Kosovo authorities, so technically they could not be indicted.

Ivanovic's murder additionally complicated the political situation in Serbia: the opposition relied on the fact that media under Vučić's control were running a defamation campaign against the victim for months before the murder, including an allegation that he was "an enemy of the Serbian people". Meanwhile, independent media published a picture of the president's brother, Andrej Vucic, sitting with Veselinovic at some private party, while Radoicic was seen as a guest attending one of the president's addresses in parliament—but the hypothesis still lacks hard evidence to substantiate the claim.

On the other side, the Serbian regime repeatedly accused certain Albanian politicians (most often Kadri Veseli, former UCK commander and former speaker of the Kosovo parliament) for masterminding Ivanovic's murder and even named one Albanian former criminal, Florim Ejupi, as the likely perpetrator.

External links

• Official webpage of Freedom House for Serbia

This article "SNS-related allegations of crime and corruption" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:SNS-related allegations of crime and corruption. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

📰 Article(s) of the same category(ies)

• Kaze Uzumaki
• Abijah Rivers
• Nouva Monika Wahlgren
• Tiki Token
• Hylos
• Ardhangi (TV series)
• Aniket Bharti

---