Members of the Board of Directors of the Regulatory Agency for Energy and Regulated Utilities (REGAGEN) Dragutin Martinović i Miroslav Vukčević they also illegally received salary supplements, according to the position of the Agency for the Prevention of Corruption (ASK).
The Agency previously established this for the Chairman of the Board of Directors Branislav Prelević.
In the decisions published yesterday on the KAS website, it is stated that Martnović and Vukčević did not ask the Agency for its opinion on whether they are in a conflict of interest if they vote for several regulations that also provided them with bonuses on earnings.
"I am satisfied that after seven months decisions were made in that case. The fact is that they committed the same act that caused the former director of ASK Jelena Perović was arrested, and today she is under house arrest", the petitioner against the members of the REGAGEN Board, the former deputy director of REGAGEN, and now an employee of that Agency, told "Vijesta" Momir Shkopelja.
According to him, in addition to the legal aspect, there is also a practical aspect of this case.
"The data on the incomes of the members of the REGAGEN Board from the ASK website are not very clear, because the variable is shown somewhere as part of the salary, and somewhere separately, but according to my calculation, by the end of 2023, the three of them received a total of 58.654 euros, namely Prelevic 23.839, Vukčević 23.054 and Martinović 11.761, slightly less because in the meantime he went to pension. With this year, it will reach the amount of around 70.000 euros", said Škopelja.
He emphasizes that REGAGEN is not an institution financed from the budget but from the licenses it issues.
"Well, that money was taken directly from the citizens, because every time someone pays a bill for electricity or fuel at the gas station, a part goes to the Agency, among other things, and to their variable members of the Board of Directors", he explained.
According to him, there is another, perhaps the most important, aspect of this case, "and that is moral".
"The regulations in question did not only grant themselves the right to the variable, but they also prescribed the method of calculation. In order not to struggle every month with making special decisions, they prescribed that they should receive the average amount of the employee variable, but only those who received the variable... It is immoral to tie your income to the contribution of others. According to the applied model, the members of the Board received a variable depending on the results of the officials' work, and not on their results...", he explained.
There, he says, is potentially another source of conflict of interest.
"The board assigns the variable to the director, the director to the department heads, the department heads to the employees, and the board member variable depends on the employee variable. This creates an order where the Board is at the top of the pyramid and which can influence its income by influencing subordinates. In addition to the variables, they did the same with their salaries. Instead of having their salaries determined by the Assembly in accordance with Article 31 of the Law on Salaries of Public Sector Employees, the members of the Board determined them for themselves through the Rules on Salaries. Even the State Audit Institution drew their attention to it in its audit report on page 10, but three months after that finding, they brought a new act, in which they repeated the same thing," concluded Škopelja.
Bonus video:
