Only Montenegro hides data on company and real estate owners

Personal identification numbers in the internet registers of state institutions can be found in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia, so that Montenegro has become the only country in the region where these data are not available to the public.

At the end of August, the Montenegrin Tax Office and the Real Estate Administration removed from the registers the registration numbers of owners and responsible persons in companies, as well as real estate owners. It was reasoned that they did it on the order of the Personal Data Protection Agency in order to comply with the Personal Data Protection Act. According to the laws on free access to information and the law on companies, these data should be public.

The Network for the Affirmation of the Non-Governmental Sector (MANS) has warned that the deletion of social security numbers from publicly available registers of state administrations will enable criminals to cover up dirty dealings with companies and real estate, but also make it harder to detect and prosecute cases of corruption within those institutions.

"Vijesti" has established that in Serbia the search by registration number is available on the website of the Agency for Business Registers and the Central Register of Securities. Anyone interested can get free information about people who have ownership in certain companies. In BiH, there is a unique web presentation where there is information about companies from the register of business entities of the Brčko District of BiH, the register of business entities of the Federation of BiH and the Register of business entities of the Republika Srpska. The situation is identical in Croatia, which is a member of the European Union, where there are personal identification numbers in the court register where access is free. There are also some services that are not free, such as the Financial Agency of Croatia. Complete data can be obtained in Macedonia, but the information must be paid to the Central Register of Companies beforehand. When it comes to Slovenia, a member of the EU, the search by family trees is available on the website of the Agency for Public Legal Records and Services, and the data is free, and the user needs to register.

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The international anti-corruption organization Transparency International, the human rights organization Aksez info, which deals with the protection of the right to free access to information in Europe, and the Network of Research Centers of the Region - OCCRP - have called for Montenegro to disclose the ID numbers again. They warned that the registers in the EU states contain data that can be used to determine who owns companies and real estate, and that this move by Montenegro is contrary to European standards.

MANS indicated that, when the registry numbers were public in the Montenegrin registers, they came across information that pointed to affairs that are not in the public interest, and were connected to the mayor of Bar, Žarko Pavićević, businessman Branislav Mićunović, vice president of the ruling DPS- and Svetozar Marović, members of the "criminal milieu like Naser Keljmendi"...

The human rights organization Aksez info has requested that Montenegro return the data on birth certificates to the registers.

In the response of that organization, it is stated that in this way the Montenegrin authorities would prove their commitment to EU standards in the field of transparency and respect for free access to information, which the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg concluded is a basic human right from the corpus of rights that defines freedom of expression. .

Transparency International warned that transparency is the first line of defense in the fight against corruption.

"If politicians and their friends are able to hide their identities in their jobs, then civil society will not know if they acted for the benefit of society or if they used the entrusted power to achieve personal interests," the organization said.