After 12 years, the people of Serbia are watching the continuation of the same series, even though the first part did not receive very good reviews.
Upon coming to power in 2012, the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) announced a fight against corruption and has since carried out dozens of arrests of former officials and businesspeople.
More than a decade later, the result of this struggle is only a few final convictions and a large amount of compensation that the state should pay to businessman Miroslav Mišković.
The main proponent of this policy was Aleksandar Vučić, then First Deputy Prime Minister, who gained great popularity after a wave of arrests.
Now president of Serbia, Vučić announced a new crackdown on corruption in February, after weeks of student-led protests demanding accountability for the deaths of 15 people in a canopy collapse in Novi Sad.
This time, many will be "surprised to see what the real fight against corruption looks like" and that "no area, no political party will be skipped," Vučić announced.
As after 2012, the government "is not waging a real and honest fight against corruption," but is instead trying to improve its political rating, believes Dušan Slijepčević, a member of the Anti-Corruption Council.
"We cannot talk about the true prosecution of corruption when it is initiated by the highest officials of the executive branch."
"The intention of all our previous governments was only to show the world that the judicial system is functioning and that the fight against corruption is being waged, but none or almost none of those cases have been solved," lawyer Slijepčević tells BBC Serbian.
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In Europe, only Bosnia and Herzegovina and Belarus are worse in this regard.
The Ministry of Justice did not respond to BBC journalists' questions about the number of final convictions for corruption and so-called related acts after 2012.
The BBC did not receive an answer to the question of why corruption is increasingly present in Serbia, despite the government's announcements.
The fight against corruption is "not measured by the number of defendants in one context, but by the number of final convictions," and there have been very few of these since 2012, Vladimir Vučinić, a former judge at the Higher Court in Belgrade, told BBC Serbian.
"It already looks like there will be very few convictions this time around," he believes.
Fines and damages that the state has to pay for lost disputes exceeded one billion euros during the first 10 years of the Serbian Progressive Party and its partners in power, Marko Milanović, special advisor to the Fiscal Council, told Danas newspaper 2022.
"For comparison, the cost of constructing the entire southern and eastern branches of Corridor 10 is XNUMX times more than the money allocated for the four clinical centers," Milanović said.
The Ministry of Finance did not respond to the BBC's question about the amount that Serbia has so far had to pay in compensation to those who have been finally acquitted of corruption and abuse of office since 2012.
"Ministerial" cases with few results
On the wave of "zero tolerance for corruption", as the Progressives called it at the time, among the first to be indicted was Oliver Dulić, the former Minister of the Environment and Spatial Planning.
After the SNS's victory in the May 2012 elections, the police knocked on the door of the then Democratic Party MP on October 6th.
"People have been writing about me for months, various lies have been told, there was talk of theft, millions, corruption, I heard that I would be arrested and the only question was what reason they would give," Dulić told BBC Serbian.
Dulić was not arrested that day due to parliamentary immunity, but the indictment two years later stated that during 2009 and 2010 he enabled the Slovenian company Nuba Invest to obtain permits for the installation of fiber optic cables, even though it allegedly did not have the necessary documentation.
Dulic and the other defendants thus enabled the Slovenian company to obtain a benefit of around 2,75 million dinars, the prosecution claimed.
The same indictment includes his associate Nikola Janjić, as well as Zoran Drobnjak, director of "Roads of Serbia", because the cables were also installed on land belonging to that public company.
Drobnjak became the head of the Roads of Serbia in December 2007, where he remains today, and during the 10 years of the trial, he even came to hearings in a company vehicle.
The "absurdity" of the process is shown by the fact that Drobnjak held a public office during that period and "was on television with Vučić every day," according to Dulić.
In July 2017, the Higher Court in Belgrade sentenced Dulić to three and a half years in prison, Janjić to three, and Drobnjak to one year.
The Court of Appeal overturned the verdict in 2018 and ordered a new trial.
Three years later, the High Court decided to acquit all the defendants, and the decision was confirmed by the Court of Appeal in 2023.
Although he believed there was no reason to be convicted, Dulić says that he lived in "permanent uncertainty" during the decade-long process.
"At any moment, I could count on the possibility that I would be sentenced by a final verdict due to the great pressure from the executive branch on the judiciary."
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In November 2012, Saša Dragin, Minister of Agriculture in the government of Mirko Cvetković, was arrested for alleged fraud in the sale of mineral fertilizers, which caused damage to the company "HIP Azotara" from Pančevo for several hundred million dinars.
An indictment was filed in 2013 against Dragin and dozens of businessmen, farmers, and public officials.
First-instance verdict of the Special Court in Belgrade was only passed in January 2025, which acquitted Dragin of the charges, while a total of 19 defendants were convicted.
Predrag Bubalo, a former official of the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) and former Minister of Economy and Privatization, is accused of helping businessmen Milan Beko and Miroslav Mišković buy the state-owned company Luka Beograd below cost in 2005.
By doing so, Bubalo damaged the state budget by more than 14 million euros, the prosecution claimed.
The Higher Court in Belgrade acquitted him in 2017, but the Court of Appeal overturned that verdict two years later.
In January 2020, Bubalo was acquitted., which was confirmed by the Court of Appeal the following year.
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Jasna Matić, former Minister of Telecommunications in Cvetković's government, was on trial for alleged abuse of office while she was the director of the Serbian Investment and Export Promotion Agency (SIEPA) from 2004 to 2007.
She was arrested in March 2014 on charges that SIEPA officials, between 2006 and 2013, damaged the Serbian budget by 119,6 million dinars through harmful contracts and illegally appropriated 91,9 million dinars.
Matić is before the Higher Court in Belgrade in 2020. sentenced to seven months of house arrest in the first instance.
The Court of Appeal overturned the verdict two years later., to The High Court re-imposed the same sentence in 2023., which her defense has announced an appeal against, so the verdict is not yet final.
The group of arrested former ministers was joined in 2015 by Slobodan Milosavljević, Minister of Agriculture during 2007 and 2008, for allegedly illegally obtaining profits for the company "Maksim & Co".
In 2023, the High Court acquitted him and seven other defendants.
"If you indict 20 people and they are all acquitted, or 15 of them are acquitted, something is wrong and someone made a mistake: maybe the police in initiating those proceedings, maybe the prosecutor's office insisting on prosecuting people, or the court that did not filter the indictments in time."
"You exposed people to persecution, and overwhelmed the court with work, without much result," says Vučinić.
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About the "Mišković case"
The "case of cases" in the fight against corruption during the SNS government is the trial of the owner of Delta Holding, Miroslav Mišković, one of the richest people in Serbia.
He was arrested in December 2012, along with his son Marko, businessman Milo Đurašković, and eight other suspects for alleged fraud in road companies and tax evasion.
"Nobody has, nor will anyone be able to, defeat Serbia, not even Miroslav Mišković," he wrote on Facebook by then Deputy Prime Minister Vučić.
After the arrest, Vučić's rating as the official who spoke most publicly about the fight against corruption doubled. the research showed CESID.
The indictment from May 2013. Mišković and his associates were accused of damaging road companies by 16,9 billion dinars and the Serbian budget by 472 million dinars, as well as of avoiding paying 320 million dinars in taxes when purchasing the Niš Road Company.
In mid-2013, the case arrived at the Special Department of the Higher Court for Organized Crime, before Judge Vladimir Vučinić, for whom this trial would become a turning point in his career.
"I knew what the climate was in society, we listened to the announcements and before Mišković was arrested, it was stated that 'the state would enter into a showdown with the tycoons and that no one would be untouchable'."
"Until this subject, I had no experience with great pressure, which is why I believed that there would be none in this one either," Vučinić, then the head of the department, told BBC Serbian.
After seven months of detention, Vučinić granted Mišković permission to defend himself from freedom by posting a bail of 12 million euros - still the highest bail amount in the history of the Serbian judiciary.
"I decided it would be in money, not in real estate or other immovable property, because I assessed that a businessman like Mišković would be most hurt if so much money were 'trapped' in his possession."
"I believed that because of that, it would be in his interest to speed up the process and get (the money) back in the end," says Vučinić.
The trial began in November 2013, and Vučinić soon had to make another difficult decision - he temporarily returned Mišković's passport so that he could travel to London for business.
"The bail had already been paid at that time and if he did not return, 12 million euros would be taken from him, he regularly attended trials and the same proceedings were conducted against his son, and I assessed that his company and thousands of employees should not suffer," Vučinić explained the decision.
"If we hadn't released him then, today he could be seeking compensation for lost profits from the deals he signed in London," Vučinić points out.
After this decision, "everything went wrong" in the former judge's career, especially when he permanently returned the passports of Miroslav and Marko Mišković in October 2014.
"The President of the High Court (Aleksandar Stepanović) told me: 'Mišković will laugh at Vučić from Trafalgar' and added that I will no longer be the president of the judicial council if I do not change my decision."
"But the fact that seven or eight years later, Mišković was finally acquitted of all charges shows how correct the decision was," says Vučinić, now a lawyer.
Miroslav Mišković was sentenced in the first instance in June 2016 to five years in prison for tax evasion, and a precedent was set after the president of the Higher Court chamber, Maja Ilić, asked the National Assembly and the Ministry of Finance for their opinion.
The conviction of Mišković was "a significant advance in the fight against corruption compared to the previous period," said Vučić, then Prime Minister of Serbia.
For Zdenko Tomanović, the defense attorney, the verdict "is not the result of the evidence, but rather the court's lack of courage to oppose the announcements and promises of the political elite" that Mišković would be convicted.
Already in 2017, the Court of Appeals returned the case to the Higher Court in Belgrade, which in 2019 issued a new conviction with lighter prison sentences for the defendants.
After almost 10 years since the start of the trial, in December 2021, the Court of Appeal once again overturned the decision of the High Court and finally acquitted all defendants in this process.
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The double price of corruption
The trial of Mišković not only failed to establish corruption and produce a verdict that would compensate public companies for damages, but also further emptied the state treasury.
Serbia is obliged to pay the Mišković family 32,7 million euros in damages following a lawsuit filed by Miroslav Mišković's company Mera Invest, the International Court of Arbitration in Washington has ruled. It is stated in the verdict, which was seen by the weekly Radar..
How did arrests become more important than convictions?
Arrests reported in the media remain the first association with the fight against corruption, regardless of the outcome of the disputes, and the arrest of Mišković is the best example, believes Dušan Slijepčević, a member of the Anti-Corruption Council since 2003.
"That's because this is not a real fight against corruption."
"Mišković's arrest happened when Vučić, the then deputy prime minister, needed such a title. Only political ratings mattered. It was all a show," the lawyer believes.
When giving his first statement before the prosecution, Dulic was "followed by 50 cameras".
"When I was finally acquitted, no one was there that day, which shows how much public interest there is in bringing a case to a conclusion."
"People obviously like to see someone arrested and that way they get a sense of justice being served, and they don't care at all about the outcome of the trial," says Dulic.
The fight against corruption then and now
The immediate motive behind the new attempt to eradicate corruption is one of the main differences between the two actions initiated by the government, according to Dulić.
"When I was prosecuted, people from the previous government and the Democratic Party (DS) were targeted in depth, with the aim of creating a perception of 'yellow thieves'."
"Today, the connection between the situation in society and the authorities' attempts to divert the topic from mass student protests is clearly visible," claims Dulić.
In a new wave of crackdowns on corruption, current officials have also been detained, such as ministers Goran Vesić and Jelena Tanasković, Niš Mayor Dragana Sotirovski, and former director of Elektroprivreda Srbije, Milorad Grčić.
"The country must fight corruption," and institutions must do their job, even when people close to the SNS and the president of the republic are arrested, Vucic said.
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The current wave of arrests is "far more massive" than the one in 2012, says Vladimir Vučinić.
"In terms of the number of arrests, the current operation reminds me more of Saber (the police operation) after the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic."
"It already seems that there will be few convictions, the proceedings are being entered into with too little evidence, sometimes without any basis for suspicion," Vučinić said.
Officials did not consult the Anti-Corruption Council in 2012 or 2025, and did not respond to the reports, says Slijepčević.
"No government has ever been interested in our opinion. So how can we talk about fighting corruption?" he asks.
This Council is part of the Serbian Government, and in its report it listed 24 controversial privatizations in the country.
Among them are Luka Beograd, C Market, Mobtel, Nacionalna štedionica, Novosti, Telekom and Trudbenik - former state-owned companies that were suspected of having acquired new owners through corruption.
Pressure from the executive branch "is not good" for the judiciary, Vučinić says.
"It is not in our interest to convict someone at all costs, but to do so where there is evidence."
"It didn't happen gradually, but in waves, and waves in nature wash up both what is good and what is bad," he concludes.
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