The Democratic Party (DS) has filed a lawsuit against the Serbian Minister of Sports and Youth, Vanja Udovicic, accusing him of “unintentionally, without applying relevant criteria, misallocating over than 20 million euro” from the state budget, which, as stated, constitutes a misuse of his official position.
“The lawsuit is based on the report of the State Audit Institution (SAI), but I submit it because neither the DRI nor the prosecutor’s office did that,” DS deputy president Dragana Rakic told reporters in front of the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime in Belgrade prior to filing the lawsuit.
According to her and the SAI report, it can be concluded that Udovicic abused his position by giving money from the state budget “to people close to the top of the Serbian Progressive Party, instead of towards sports and youth development.”
She stated that, based on the SAI report from 2018, published in December last year, there is a reasonable suspicion that “the scale of high corruption is unbelievably large” in the country.
“Udovicic must no longer be in any public office,” Rakic said, and announced that the DS would address the Prosecutor’s Office more often because “institutions in Serbia are not functioning properly and there is no rule of law.”
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Lawyer and the Democratic Party’s Secretary, Dusan Dincic, said that the SAI report has 170 pages, “each of which could serve as the basis for the lawsuit”, and expects that the Prosecution will launch a “comprehensive investigation and examine the entire ‘pyramid’ of persons possibly connected to in this case “.
The representative of the Free Serbia Movement, Dusan Petrovic, who, as stated, was among the first to raise the issue of how funds were spent in the Ministry of Sports, said that he was “fired from his position in the Ministry of Sports and Youth following a rigged disciplinary procedure” and that his case will now be heard in front of the Constitutional Court.
“The amount in question is 20 million euro, which amounts to two-thirds of the annual budget of the Ministry of Sports and Youth,” Petrovic pointed out.
The lawsuit states that, in 2018, the Ministry allocated a total of about 20 million euro to 86 sports federations to finance regular and special sports events, international competitions and sports camps “without first assessing the quality of these events and activities and without applying quality evaluation criteria, as prescribed in the relevant Rulebook”.
(Beta, Naslovi.net, 20.08.2020)
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