The treasurer of the Assembly, Tamara Čađenović, claimed today that in recent years she has paid around 200.000 euros per year to MPs and officials of that institution for travel and per diems and that she was only doing what she was told.
Thus began the trial of Čađenović, who was accused of embezzling around 35.000 euros, by taking the money for herself and presenting it as an expense for the official trips of members of parliament and officials of the Assembly.
Denying her guilt, she said that in 2011 she was forced to move from the archives of the Assembly to the position of treasurer, that she was overbooked with other jobs and that she repeatedly asked her superiors to find someone to help her, because in recent years, due to the volume of work, she was not could manage to do everything that was asked of her by herself.
She also added that she repeatedly got into unpleasant situations when she would ask for a written authorization to take money and clarification about how much money she should hand over.
"There were 11 of us working in an office like yours. There were large amounts of those orders every day. There were a lot of errors in the procedure, they took advantage of the situation to not return the money immediately, usually the same people go on those trips," she said.
Judge Rade Ćetković told her several times to talk about what she was charged with, after which she clarified that the court should also take into account the conditions under which she worked.
She also pointed out that when she went on sick leave for ten days, the employees of the Assembly lost the keys to the cash register's safe.
When asked by the court - why she allowed herself to be responsible for such amounts of money and why she did not insist on written authorizations, she explained that previously she had a smaller job and less travel, and that she was told several times that she was there to do what she is told, and that others will check how that money is spent.
She added that there were about 170 officials and 80 deputies and that they brought travel order forms every day and filled in the data themselves.
"The way they put it on my table, I do the math. Usually one employee took money for the whole group. As a rule, a person could only take money for the others if he was authorized to do so, which was not the case, but they knew how to tell me - who are you to check who they are," she stated.
She added that she is aware that she is in a problem, because there were a lot of mistakes both in the procedure and in the scope of the work that she had to complete herself.
"They just told me one day, you're moving to accounting from today, I've never done that before, I didn't even know how to do that, I learned that job online," she said.
She added that on the order of the secretary, she gave loans to persons who are not permanently employed in the Assembly, that is, to the drivers of that institution, but that she did not write it in the book, because it is basically not allowed.
"I couldn't stand it mentally or physically anymore, but I simply had no option but to quit my job," she said.
She is charged with the extended criminal offense of embezzlement and the extended criminal offense of falsifying an official document.
"The defendant is accused of misappropriating the money entrusted to her in the service in 2016 and of entering false information into official documents as a cashier in the Financial Affairs Bureau of the Parliament of Montenegro, taking from the treasury money for herself and on a certain number of orders for official trips she put false signatures of deputies and employees of the Assembly and other persons, to whom the money was allegedly paid in the name of per diems for official trips abroad," the indictment reads.
The Prosecutor's Office announced earlier that, in relation to a certain number of travel orders for official trips, which are suspected to be also falsified, a separate criminal case was formed against the currently unknown perpetrator.
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