The councilor of the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) in the Kotor Municipal Assembly, Vuk Banićević, and his brother Vlado Banićević, aka Gorčilo, were arrested on the orders of the Special State Prosecutor's Office (SDT) on suspicion of being involved in cocaine smuggling as co-perpetrators on four occasions, at the end of 2020 and during 2021.
The Special State Prosecutor's Office announced that officers of the Special Police Department (SPO) arrested the Banićević brothers on Wednesday, between 13 and 14 p.m., on suspicion that they had committed a criminal offense - the creation of a criminal organization, and as co-perpetrators, four criminal offenses - unauthorized production, possession and distribution of narcotics.
"The persons deprived of their liberty were questioned as suspects at the Special State Prosecutor's Office, after which they were ordered to be detained for a maximum of 72 hours from the time of their deprivation of liberty," the SDT statement reads.
The Special Police Department, acting on an order from the Higher Court in Podgorica, searched the apartments and other premises of the Banićevićs in Kotor and Podgorica, in order to collect evidence of criminal acts and find items of importance for criminal proceedings.
SPO officers were in Kotor last night, however, even after the arrest of the Banićević brothers, a large number of police officers are still in Boka.
In the period from 2020 to 2021, during which the SDT suspects the Banićevićs of participating in cocaine smuggling, Vuk Banićević was a DPS councilor.
He has been a councilor since October 2020, and was listed as 3rd on the DPS councilor list, which can still be seen on the local Assembly website.
As a DPS councilor, Banićević continued to attend sessions of the Kotor parliament, even though his mandate ended in October last year, because the final results of the elections in that municipality on September 29, 2024, had not been announced for more than a year.
Due to this situation, the termination of the mandate of the councilors from the previous convocation was not verified.
The Constitutional Court on Wednesday rejected the appeal of the Kotor DPS Board to repeat the voting at two polling stations - Prčanj and Mirac, which created the conditions for the announcement of the final results.
The Municipal Election Commission (MEC) of Kotor confirmed the voting results today, which paved the way for the verification of new councilor mandates.
The Agency for the Prevention of Corruption, at the beginning of November this year, determined that Vuk Banićević, as a public official, violated Article 25, paragraph 2 of the Law on the Prevention of Corruption, because he did not report accurate and complete data in the report on income and assets for 2024.
The agency announced that Banićević did not report a 2014 BMW X6, a 2012 A6, a 2020 Piaggio Beverly 300 motorcycle, or a 189 m2 building under construction in Grahovo.
In addition, as stated in the ASK decision, Banićević did not report the "Berreta" semi-automatic weapon, the "Berreta" hunting semi-automatic weapon, and the "Marlin" repeating long-barreled weapon.
ASK also states that the councilor did not register either 110 shares of "Jugopetrol", or his wife's basic salary of 3.829,20 euros, which she earns from the company "Third Element". In addition, in the asset file, as stated in the ASK decision, he declared a smaller apartment he has in Sveti Stefan for five square meters.
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