The Public Prosecutor’s Office in Novi Sad has suspended the investigation of Igor Becic, a member of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) and chairman of the Parliamentary Commission for the Security Services Control, on suspicion of trafficking in illicit influence and endangering the safety of Natasa Prisic, a former coordinator of the Internal Control Sector at the state company Electric Power Industry of Serbia (EPS).
While doing her job at EPS, Prisic discovered that more than one hundred EPS employees have been receiving salaries despite never showing up for work. These included Sladjana Miljanovic and Slobodan Lucic, employees of the Novi Sad branch.
Because of this, Natasa Prisic eventually lost her job, while Becic was given another term as head of the committee that controls all security services.
“I first informed President Aleksandar Vučić’s cabinet about everything. I wrote him a letter about this whole affair and the hundreds of EPS employees who receive salaries but have not been showing up for work for years. I was then called to give a statement, after which I received an official document from the Ministry of the Interior, signed by then-Secretary of State Milisav Miličković, stating that there were elements of an illegal act (in the affair) and that the case has been transferred to the relevant prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad.”
“After eight months of silence, I was then informed first that there was no lawsuit filed against Igor Becic by the Prosecutor’s Office. Immediately after that, I was informed that there was actually an open case but that it has been transferred to the Higher Prosecutor’s Office, at the Anti-Corruption Department, where I testified again for hours and documented all my allegations,” Natasa says.
“The Higher Prosecutor’s Office then concluded that my statement should be rejected because “there is no basis for suspecting that a prosecutable offense was committed ex officio.” This nonsense only shows how false everything was and how Becic and his team tried in every possible way to avoid being held accountable for everything they did,” says Natasa, who has been subjected to constant bullying and physical threats ever since.
Eventually, Becic was able to throw her out of EPS for “violation of work discipline” because she spoke in public on her social media account about the affair she uncovered.
Natasa has filed a lawsuit against EPS for unfair dismissal. In the meantime, the EPS Internal Control Sector, in which she worked and which uncovered a few affairs in the nation’s electricity provider, has been closed.
(Nova, 29.06.2022)
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