Vučić’s path to the bottom: From an anti-corruption fighter to an autocrat who creates his own tycoons

At the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), known as the Washington Arbitration, the state of Serbia lost a dispute earlier this year against Mera Invest, a company owned by Marko Miskovic, son of well-known businessman Miroslav Miskovic. According to the ruling, to which the accused has the right to object, Serbia is obliged to pay €30 million to the Miskovic family.

By the end of the year, the court is expected to rule on Serbia’s request to annul this decision, and if the ICSID ruling stands, citizens will have to pay out of their own pockets for Vucic’s attempt to pretend he is an anti-corruption campaigner. The simple math is that every citizen will have to put aside EUR 4 to pay off the debt created by the President of the Serbian State.

How much Vučić’s fight against corruption will ultimately cost us may be the subject of a long investigation. It is impossible to estimate at this moment the total damage of all the malversations in which people from the Serbian Progressive Party have been involved, but it is certainly in the millions of euros.

Since he came to power and became First Deputy Prime Minister, Aleksandar Vucic has sought to concentrate all power in the country in himself. Today, ten years after the change of regime, Serbia has become a country where one man decides every segment of life, takes over the role of institutions, judges the ‘guilty’ and frees the ‘innocent’.

In 2012, on the eve of the formation of the Ivica Dacic government, Defence Minister Aleksandar Vucic said:

“When it comes to corruption, they will not be protected or there will be no government of Serbia. This is an important message that both our members and coalition partners need to understand. Do not be surprised if one of our own is prosecuted in a month or two. We will show by our examples that we will not play with the state and that we are all equal, not that some have political protection because they are ours or of any ruling party”.

This was in July, Miroslav Mišković was arrested in December. He was on trial for tax evasion through “Mera Investment Fund Limited”, a company headed by Marko Mišković. The owner of “Delta” was accused of encouraging his son Marko to engage in illegal activities through this company.

At the end of February 2022, the Court of Appeal in Belgrade acquitted Mišković and his son, and the decision of the Arbitration Court in Washington ordered Serbia to pay €30 million to Mišković’s company. This decision has been appealed and is pending.

This is certainly the first major “result” of Vučić’s fight against corruption.

Krusik, apartments, Belgrade waterfront…

In the intervening 10 years, everything that could be linked to corruption at the very top of the state has happened. From the promised solution of 24 controversial privatisations – nothing.

Among the biggest corruption scandals of this government was the discovery that Minister Siniša Mali had 24 apartments in a building in Bulgaria. At that time, the purchase of the apartment of Minister Alexander Vulin, who allegedly bought the property worth almost €250 000 by borrowing money from his wife’s aunt in Canada, came under great question. This, as Vulin himself explained, by bringing cash to Serbia on several occasions.

The ministers were not responsible for this, nor were the other SNS members who were accused of similar malversations.

No one was held accountable for the “Krušik” deal and the involvement of the late minister’s father, Nebojša Stefanović, and the GIM company in the arms trade, in which “Krušik” was defrauded of tens of millions of dollars. No one has dealt with the conflict of interest in which Prime Minister Ana Brnabić found herself when it emerged that the company Aseko, in which her brother Igor was then a director, had made tens of millions of euros in deals with the state. And the company of the brother of Minister Darija Kisić Tepavčević, Bojan Kisić, had made multi-million dollar deals with the state.

We do not even know what is behind the Belgrade Waterfront project, Air Serbia, nor the numerous inter-state agreements that Serbia is concluding with China, Russia, Turkey, etc. These deals are shrouded in secrecy and are concluded without tenders, competition or control.

But that is why we know that, since the progressives came to power, the men close to power, Milan Radoicic and Zvonko Veselinovic, have earned more than the aforementioned Miskovic.

Growing the empire of the Kosovo duo

When a company manages to increase its net profit by 57% in two years, one of which was marked by a pandemic and a downturn in the economic activity of most companies, including those of the world’s countries, it is surely a business success worthy of the attention of the wider public. What can we say about a company that, in such an environment, increases its net profit not by 57%, but by 57 times, and that goes almost unnoticed by the public, because these successes are not spoken about loudly. They are not bragged about by the owners, nor by top government officials who, as a rule, do not miss the opportunity to point out when Serbia’s GDP is growing faster than in other countries.

Such success, which many Serbian businessmen can only dream of, is the reality of the owners of Novi Pazar put, which had a net profit of 20.9 million dinars in 2019, compared to almost 1.2 billion dinars last year. Better than that, there could only be a perpetual motion machine to generate profits. Along the way, mainly by asphalting roads throughout Serbia, the construction of which is financed with public money – a smaller part from the republican and local budgets, and mostly foreign loans that will be paid back with interest by all taxpayers – Novi Pazar road paved the path to success, by increasing business income with two to five billion dinars, NIN wrote.

About what Vučić’s fight against corruption and crime looked like, retired inspector Siniša Janković, a former member of the Working Group for 24 disputed privatizations, spoke in an interview for the NIN weekly.

He said that the Task Force then extended its investigation to other corruption scandals, but in the meantime it turned out that good work at the Ministry of the Interior is paid for with fines and demotions.

“This government has never had the sincere intention to take on the even more serious fight against political corruption that they announced when they came in. Now we have come to the point where someone is defending drug dealers and murderers, which was previously unthinkable. “No political power has ever done this before”, said Janković.

NIN reported that Janković, as the leader of the team that had the most success, told how they worked and how they were stopped when they got to the powerful people connected to the government.

“When we got to the people who have more power and were already allied with the new government, then the obstruction started in different ways. In the autumn of 2012, when the working group started to work and when we were supposed to present the results, then Vucic went to the assembly with our weekly presentations and waved the announcement of new arrests. All those who had played a significant role in crime and corruption and who had initially allied themselves with the new authorities remained untouched,” he said.

Janković explained that “some former ministers and Miroslav Misković” were arrested, but that they did not have the most power at the time. He added that the Task Force was disbanded after two years on the grounds that it cost a lot – reportedly two million.

“Through the criminal charges, what was admitted to us, we came to the sum of 800 million euros. What we were not given to implement, and we conducted investigations until the very end, is about 1.2 billion euros. We have not only carried out investigations into privatisation, but also, for example, into corruption in fertilisers. We went deep into investigations, for example in Srbijagas, but the task force was abolished and we could not carry it out. We called ourselves the Vučić Group, and then we had what Kafka wrote in The Trial. A campaign was launched against us in order to bring the whole of society under control, including crime. This is what we are seeing now, after so many years. There has never been any honest will on the part of this political power to deal with crime. We only had, as I called it in my book, detention meat, because the arrests were only information for the regime’s media. These were the marginals and everything stopped when the government protected the main culprits who were linked to it,” Janković said, among other things.

The result of Vucic’s performance – enthronement

Regardless of the epilogue of the arrest and promises, the political profit was multiple.

The SNS, which praises its leader’s story of fighting the greatest social scourge of modern times, won 48.35 percent of the vote in the 2014 national elections, double the 24.04 percent they received under Tomislav Nikolic in May 2012.

After the parliamentary elections, Vucic took over as Prime Minister of Serbia and then as President.

As the power of the progressive leader grew, the story of the fight against corruption and crime gradually faded into oblivion, only occasionally being mentioned when opinion polls showed that there was something good to be said on the subject.

In the meantime, cases such as the Savamala demolitions, the Krusik and Jovanjica scandals and the emergence of the Veljko Belivuk clan have shown that the fight against corruption and crime is far below the agenda of the government and the country’s first man.

In none of the mentioned cases did the state, that is, the ruling party and its leader, prevent the spread of crime and corruption. Moreover, it was discovered that the government representatives, directly or indirectly, were participants in these affairs./Nova S