Construction of Medenica and Arsić with the plaintiff

Members of the Special Police Department (SPO), which operates under the Special State Prosecutor's Office (SST), visited the Municipality of Tivat yesterday and seized local administration documentation related to the construction of luxury villas in the settlement of Krašići, whose investors are Milos Medenica, the son of the arrested former president of the Supreme Court of Montenegro Vesne Medenica and his business partner and godfather Vesna Medenica, a businessman from Tivat Rado Gago Arsić.

According to the unofficial information of "Vijesti", the documentation related to the construction of those controversial buildings on the "foam of the sea", which dates back to 2011 and was issued by the then city DPS-SDP government of Tivat with the mayor, to Medenica and Arsić was exempted. Dragan Kankaras (DPS) at the helm.

The luxurious villas of Medenica and Arsića were built there exceeding the dimensions of the building permit. The two of them, as investors, at the beginning of 2020, according to the findings of the Network for the Affirmation of the Non-Governmental Sector (MANS), then carried out a partial usurpation of nearby plots of land owned by the state, that is, the Municipality of Tivat.

In April 2020, MANS submitted a criminal complaint against Medenica and Arsić to the Higher State Prosecutor's Office in Podgorica, due to the suspicion that they usurped part of state property in Krašići and illegally built. The locals of Krašič previously reported to the inspection that one of the two completed segments of the first phase of the new lungo mare promenade in that place, about thirty meters long, was literally cut off and taken away from the Municipality of Tivat as the investor of that public utility facility and the citizens as its users.

Namely, on the coast below the two large "tourist villas" Medenica and Arsić, the workers then built two fence walls from concrete blocks and thus cut off the new promenade. The walls were erected on a cadastral plot owned by the state, that is, the Municipality of Tivat, under two villas under construction on plots owned by Medenica and Arsić.

According to the records of MANS, one of the walls with which the public promenade under construction was fenced off was partly located on plot 7/8, which is owned by Arsić.

Because of this, that NGO filed a criminal complaint against Mednica and Arsić, accusing them of having committed criminal acts - illegal occupation of land and construction of a building without registration and documentation for construction, but this did not result in the prosecution of the son of the then President of the Supreme Court and her godfather, a Tivat businessman close to the DPS.

At the beginning of June 2020, the urban planning and construction inspection of the then Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism (MORT) demolished the illegally built walls on the route of the public promenade. MORT, which was then managed by the Prime Minister Dusko Markovic (DPS) previously rejected the request for free access to information to MANS, which in June 2020 requested for inspection all inspection decisions related to illegal construction on the seashore in Krašići, on state plots in front of the villas Medenica and Arsić.

MORT stated in the decision on the rejection of MANS's request that "the disclosure of the requested information would significantly jeopardize the interest of the official duties of this Ministry, and therefore the further planning and performance of inspection supervision".

Meanwhile, Miloš Medenica and his mother Vesna were arrested in May and April this year on suspicion of being members of an organized criminal group involved in drug trafficking, that is, for complicity and illegal influence in the case of the former first lady of the Montenegrin judiciary.

For now, it is not known whether yesterday's action by the SPO and the collection of documentation related to Medeniča and Arsić's controversial construction in Krašće was undertaken as part of that or possibly some other investigation against Medenica and related persons, i.e. the (non)reaction of the state and its institutions to illegal construction projects on the coast of that part of the Tivat Bay.

SDT also asks about the city stadium

The SPO, as unofficially reported by "Vijesti" yesterday, from the Municipality of Tivat by order of the SDT, also seized the documentation for another case whose actor is Rado Arsić - the business of the Football Club "Arsenal", at the time when that businessman was the head of the Board of Directors of the club owned by the Municipality of Tivat, that is, Arsić's and the actions of the then President of the Municipality of Tivat, Siniša Kusovac, related to the handling of part of the property of the Municipality used by that FC.

The audit of the club's operations, which was carried out in November last year by the municipal Internal Audit Service on the order of the current Tivat mayor Željko Komnenovil (NP), established the existence of numerous illegalities in the operations of the FC while Arsić was at its head, as well as the suspicious spending of tens of thousands of euros of city money that Kusovac transferred to the club, in addition to official competitions.

The audit led by Jela Mrdak, among other things, concluded that Arsenal's Board of Directors, headed by Kusovac at the time, illegally leased the property of the Municipality - the fence around the football stadium in the city park.

It was established that Kusovac, immediately before the arrival of Arsić at the head of the club, unilaterally terminated the cooperation of the FC with Porto Montenegro, who, in exchange for branding the fence wall around the stadium with his colors and without writing the company's logo or placing any advertisements on the wall, which is in the contact zone of the Porto Montenegro settlement, paid the club as much as 12.000 euros per month.

On June 15, 2018, Arsenal's Board of Directors concluded a contract with the company "Mediativa" from Tivat, to which it leased the wall of the city's stadium for the installation of billboards for a period of one year, at a price 36 times lower than that previously paid by Porto Montenegro.

Namely, the fence wall around the city's football stadium "Mediativi" was given for a rent of only 333 euros including VAT per month, and then the company partially leased it at much higher prices for the placement of advertisements to various other economic entities.

"FC Arsenal did not have a legal basis to conclude a contract on the release of the wall because it did not have the consent of the Municipality for this legal transaction.