The case of former Montenegrin state official Svetozar Marović, who admitted that he was the head of an organized criminal group, is almost forgotten. Marović is reportedly still being treated in Belgrade and thus avoids serving a prison sentence in his homeland.
The former president of the state union of Serbia and Montenegro, long-time president of the Montenegrin assembly and high-ranking official of the ruling Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS), Svetozar Marović, recently had his apartment in Budva, which was temporarily confiscated, returned to him.
That information from the Special Prosecutor's Office almost cleared the dust from the Marović file, whose protagonist has been in Belgrade for more than a year and a half, where he is allegedly being treated and which is why he is not returning to Montenegro to serve his prison sentence.
Obrad Miša Stanišić, a high-ranking official of the ruling DPS, of which Marović was the main idealist, confirmed that there is nothing new in front of TV Vijesti's cameras the night before yesterday in the show "Načisto".
Stanišić's words, that Montenegro is looking for Marović and Serbia is not giving him, however, do not sound convincing even to lawyer Veselin Radulović, the legal representative of the non-governmental organization MANS, which first pointed the finger at Marović's misdeeds in Budva:
"Absolutely, that cannot sound logical or convincing, because Marović was available to Montenegro at the time when he should have been available and at the time when the criminal proceedings were being conducted. Therefore, it is indisputable that, I would say, due to the deliberate omission of the state authorities, came into a situation to leave the territory of Montenegro. Neither was his travel document taken away, nor was any measure applied to him," comments Radulović.
Radio Free Europe wrote to the Montenegrin Ministry of Justice, from whom we asked for information on whether there is any new information about Svetozar Marović and whether they have contact with the competent state authorities in Serbia, who have so far refused to extradite him.
We did not receive a response from that institution, but we did receive a response from Marović's lawyer Zdravko Begović, according to whom his client's health is deteriorating.
"Despite the fact that he is under the daily control of a specialist doctor in Belgrade, his mental condition is really not good, he is receiving appropriate therapy. And from the communications I have with him, it is obvious that this is a man who has serious mental problems. And, what regarding the eventual release from the hospital and arrival in Montenegro, there is still no talk of that," says Begović.
The story of Svetozar Marović, for whom the Montenegrin state institutions issued a red Interpol warrant on May 12, 2017, filled the columns of the local and regional press for a long time, as an example of a man who achieved high success on the scale of political and social power, only to ended up in one of the cells in the Spuška detention center, where he spent five months.
After pleading guilty to being the leader of a criminal organization that damaged Budva's budget by tens of millions of euros through numerous embezzlements, he was legally sentenced to three years and nine months in prison. However, instead of serving the remaining sentence, Svetozar Marović left for the Serbian capital in mid-2016, due to alleged hospital treatment, and has not returned to Montenegro since then.
Although he agreed with the prosecution to pay one million euros into the state budget and donate 100.000 to humanitarian purposes, Marović never did so, so his prison sentence was increased by a year, and the state confiscated part of his property, including the forest, meadows and pastures, but also five cottages that the Marovićs had in Budva.
Thus, from the first case of high corruption or crime in Montenegro, which had the proportions of a first-class scandal and which raised the reputation of the Montenegrin prosecutor's office, it has come to the point that it is a story that sometimes causes ridicule in part of the public and is interpreted as a mockery of law and justice.
"What is indisputable is that it is a gross abuse and quite possibly a political agreement, which resulted in such a court epilogue. And that is what sends an ugly message and an ugly image of the Montenegrin judiciary. It seems that politics, as always prevailed over what should be the rule of law. If it were not so, Svetozar Marović would have been serving a multi-year prison sentence a long time ago, and the prosecution would not have been able to negotiate such a low sentence and not serve such a low sentence," says lawyer Radulović.
Lawyer Radulović does not believe in the possibility that Marović will find himself behind the walls of the prison in Spuz after everything:
"While all politics in Montenegro are created by those who created it together with Svetozar Marović all these years and decades, I have no hope that justice will be served and that Svetozar Marović will be available to those authorities, which are under the full control of his party and every other comrades," concludes Radulović.
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