Portrait of former GST

Milivoje Katnić was the chief special prosecutor in the period from the summer of 2015 to February 17, 2022, when the Prosecutor's Council dismissed him from his position after a marathon session because he had acquired the conditions for retirement.

In 1993, as a trainee in the judiciary, he transferred to the Military Court, where he was later elected as a military judge. He performed that job until the abolition of military justice in 2004. After that, Katnić moved to the Court of Appeal. After the establishment of the Special State Prosecutor's Office (SDT), he ran for and won the trust for the first GST.

His candidacy was marked by numerous data on Katnić's participation in the Dubrovnik battlefield, and this topic was particularly heated by two NGOs who asked for light on Katnić's wartime biography and recalled that in 2011, one of the prisoners in the Morinj military camp accused him of being KOS officer, during the invasion of Croatia, was responsible for looting and arson in Cavtat.

Katnić has repeatedly denied this.

In the first year of the leadership of the SDT, Milivoje Katnić was praised because at the very beginning of his mandate he issued an arrest warrant for the former high-ranking DPS official Svetozar Marović, who later admitted that he was the head of the Budva criminal group that damaged the state by dozens million euros.

After signing two plea agreements with the SDT, Marović used his release from custody to go to Belgrade, where he is now.

Hence the numerous suspicions in the public that the Budva episode was done for the sake of the winning faction of the then ruling DPS.

In the fall of 2016, on the day of the parliamentary elections, Katnić carried out one of the largest operations to arrest a criminal group, which was later accused and convicted in the first instance of preparing terrorism in Montenegro. That verdict was overturned and a retrial is underway.

Among the accused are the then leaders of the DF, Milan Knežević, and the current speaker of the parliament, Andrija Mandić.

From then until today, there have been numerous doubts about Katnić's work in that case, where, among other things, it was claimed that he helped DPS and its partners win a majority in the elections.

Katnić's justice was often judged to be selective - most of the criminal charges filed by various non-governmental organizations (among which MANS is leading), media investigations related to corruption and abuse of state resources, were rejected.

The NGO sector and opposition MPs, as well as the media, called the Special State Prosecutor's Office during the Katnić era the "beating stick" of the DPS and Milo Đukanović.

For Đukanović, members of his family, according to Katnić, there was never "not even a remote doubt".

He changed his rhetoric slightly only in the fall of 2021, when after the "Pandora Papers" case was formed in the SDT, Katnić said:

"There is a form of doubt, I won't say remote, but on the ultimate semi-base".

The "Pandora Papers" case was formed based on data from the research network and claims that Đukanović and his son Blažo entered into secret contracts on the management of their assets in 2012, hiding behind a complicated network of related companies from Great Britain, Switzerland, Panama, Gibraltar...

After the fall of the DPS in August 2020, it was clear that Katnić would no longer have a place in the prosecutor's system, despite the fact that on July 3 of that year he received a second mandate from the then Prosecutorial Council.

The new parliamentary majority needed time to amend the Law on State Prosecution, and then to form a new Prosecutorial Council when it became clear that Katnić would not see the end of his second term.