Who is Veselin Vukotić: "The Magician of the Montenegrin Economy"

Professor Veselin Vukotić was arrested in the investigation of the state company "13. jul Plantaže".

The magician of the Montenegrin economy - as he has been labeled for years, is most deserving of the fact that the Montenegrin political and economic elite accepted for granted the thesis about the end of history and the absence of an alternative to the (neo)liberal concept.

Professor Vukotić is known as a great opponent of state interventionism and protectionism and a promoter of the idea of ​​a microstate.

Good connoisseurs of the situation will say that Vukotić's vision of Montenegro becoming a Mediterranean tiger was magical for a handful of privileged people, who during the propagation of his ideology of neoliberalism came to enormous wealth.

Vukotić strongly advocated privatization, and he is the creator of the mass voucher privatization program, in which vouchers were distributed to citizens free of charge and could be exchanged for company shares. However, a large number of those vouchers, in the absence of the right information, ended up with privatization funds that closed a large number of state-owned enterprises in order to get valuable assets.

For a large number of citizens, Vukotić's vision was more than disastrous - hundreds of destroyed factories, thousands of workers on the streets, crumbs for social workers, crumbs for pensioners...

"Private property is a mechanism that turns enemies into friends", "We don't sell companies, we buy strategic partners", are just some of the sentences that could be heard from Vukotić.

This advocate of the free market and the inspirer of the Montenegrin economic school, that entire period still remains on the state budget.

Vukotić was in the cabinet of Montenegrin Prime Minister Vuk Vukadinović from 1985 to 1988, and he was also the Minister for Privatization and Entrepreneurship in the federal government of Ante Marković from 1989 to 1992.

In 1992, he founded the international postgraduate studies "Entrepreneurial Economics" at the Faculty of Economics in Podgorica.

And while he convinced students that the future lies in entrepreneurship, business ideas and the open market, he firmly held his position on the Board of Directors in Plantaže, which remained majority owned by the state. He has been the president of the board of directors in that company since 2006.

He was also part of the "smart, young and beautiful" group, and a long-time vice-president of the Privatization Council, thus participating in the privatization of a large number of Montenegrin companies.

Vukotić strongly believes in competitiveness, which is why, at least at first it seemed, he founded the University of Donja Gorica (UDG) with partners (among others the long-term prime minister and current president of the state Milo Đukanović and Dragan Vukčević, the current president of the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts).

"The book "Dangerous words" or the dictionary of free market economy is built into the foundations of the UDG building. A sign that graduates of this University will be free (in demand) on the wider market... This is our preparation for entering the EU! Our goal is to help Montenegro become a Mediterranean tiger in the EU!", said Vukotić. However, the authoritarian, maltene biblical dictionary also says something about his understanding of freedom, so at UDG there are "13 commandments for taking exams and colloquiums".

Brzo Vukotić complained that the system of financing higher education in Montenegro and in the region is "undemocratic and discriminatory towards students of private colleges", because these students do not have access to the budget funds of all students.

He was supported by Milo Đukanović, then prime minister, so UDG soon "became competitive" with the help of budget funds, which negatively affected the University of Montenegro, which saw reductions in grants and the number of students and increased debts.