The President of the Civic Movement URA, Dritan Abazović, at a press conference organized on the occasion of the alarming air pollution in Pljevlja, said that due to the criminal offense of environmental pollution and abuse of official position, that is, due to the ecological disaster in Pljevlja, he filed a criminal complaint today with the Special State Prosecutor's Office (SDT) against the President of the Board of Directors of the Electric Power Company of Montenegro, Milutin Đukanović, and members of the Board, as well as Executive Director Zdravko Dragaš and Minister of Energy and Mining Admir Šahmanović.
As announced by the civic movement, Abazović said at a press conference that the documents that EPCG is hiding show that they gave themselves consent for trial operation, which, according to Abazović, is illegal, because that is the job of the competent inspections.
"The citizens of Pljevlja should know that a handful of people, due to their armchair interests, allowed their children to be poisoned," the leader of the GP URA emphasized.
He published documents that, he claims, indicate that the Board of Directors, at the proposal of six managers of the Pljevlja Thermal Power Plant (TPP), put the thermal power plant into trial operation without the approval of the competent inspectorates. The documents show, according to the GP URA statement, that the inspectorate learned from the media that the thermal power plant had been put into operation, and that it then carried out an inspection and gave the thermal power plant eight days to declare whether it had completed the necessary work. The inspector announced, as stated in the document dated December 11, that he would issue a decision rejecting the request for trial operation.
"This is a precedent set intentionally because these people who signed the consent are not so ignorant that they don't know that it's not their job, but that it's the inspection's responsibility. The consent was signed by six people to distribute responsibility," Abazović is convinced.
He said that the air pollution meters at the Thermal Power Plant were not working.
"I believe they turned them off intentionally so that no one would know what the pollution level was. TE has been measuring air pollution since it started, but since December 1st those devices have not been working," the leader of the GP URA pointed out.
The explanation of the criminal complaint states that after the Pljevlja Thermal Power Plant was put into trial operation on December 1, 2025, air pollution in that city with sulfur dioxide increased, which put the health of citizens in question, who are turning to health institutions in Pljevlja in large numbers.
The ecological reconstruction was not carried out in accordance with the law, because it did not receive the necessary permits, the URA BP announced.
"No segment related to the ecological reconstruction was put into operation, which was the main and only reason for the suspension of its operation for eight months. Instead of the authorities assessing whether the ecological reconstruction standards were met for the TPP to begin trial operation, the consent was given by the acting director of the TPP Bojan Đordan, technical director Ljubiša Đurković and several other managers - which is not their competence according to the law. The proposal for a decision to the Board of Directors of EPCG on confirming the consent for the commissioning of the plant, with the statement that the decision was urgent, was signed by Đordan. The leadership and management of EPCG and the Ministry of Energy, headed by Minister Admir Šahmanović, did not perform their official duties and allowed the commissioning of the TPP, thereby committing abuse of official duty (Article 416 of the Criminal Code of Montenegro)," the statement from the GP URA states.
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That party called on SDT to obtain data from EPCG from their systems for continuous monitoring of flue gases, in order to see the effects of ecological reconstruction, if any, through the reduction of emissions of dust particles, sulfur and nitrogen oxides.
"This is one of the most serious waves of air pollution in the last few years in Pljevlja. According to available data, the concentration of sulfur dioxide, one of the most harmful pollutants, reached 805 micrograms per cubic meter of air two days ago, many times above the permitted daily limit value of 125. We expect the SDT to investigate: With whose consent was the TPP put into trial operation? Were the provisions of the Law on Spatial Planning and Construction of Facilities complied with? As well as whether all competent inspection bodies gave the necessary consents for the trial operation?", asked the GP URA.
Abazović announced that the criminal report would be supplemented, and recalled that the rights to life and a healthy environment are guaranteed by the Constitution.
The head of the GP URA parliamentary group in the Parliament of Montenegro, Miloš Konatar, announced that the government deputies on the Committee on Economy rejected their request for a control hearing of the authorities in this case, regardless of the fact that, as he said, at the moment we have no more important issue in the country than the situation in Pljevlja, where citizens are still being poisoned.
Abazović provided support to the citizens of Pljevlja who today organized a protest against the current alarming air pollution situation in their city.
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