The multi-year court process over alleged environmental damage caused to the Tara River during the construction of the highway has ended in the first instance with the Basic Court in Kolašin dismissing the charges against the Chinese company CRBC and its responsible person. Hey Shiqiang for the criminal offense of environmental damage. The reason is that the statute of limitations for criminal prosecution has expired, which occurred during the main trial held in October 2025.
On December 31, 2025, the Prosecutor's Office was provided with a written copy of the verdict of the Basic Court in Kolašin, which dismissed the charges against the defendants for the criminal offense of environmental damage due to the statute of limitations on criminal prosecution, which occurred during the main trial before the Basic Court in Kolašin in October 2025.
"The prosecution has appealed the aforementioned verdict to the Higher Court in Bijelo Polje," the Kolašin Basic State Prosecutor's Office (ODT) announced in response to questions from "Vijesti".
The ODT filed the indictment against CRBC and Shiqiang on February 26, 2021. The indictment related to the construction of a coastal fortification on the right side of the Tara River bed, at the Uvač 4 location. The fortification was, as stated, built from surplus material from the excavation of the Pajkov Vir tunnel, without previously established environmental protection measures. This, according to the prosecution, led to a greater and wider disruption of biodiversity.
As the ODT announced five years ago, "the Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) operated without previously established environmental protection measures, thereby causing damage to the Tara River to a greater extent and over a wider area."
In addition to the charge of environmental damage (Article 307, paragraph 1 of the Criminal Code), the company and the responsible person were also charged with the criminal offense of constructing a facility without a construction application and documentation (Article 326a of the Criminal Code). However, in this part of the charge, the defendants were acquitted due to changes in the legal regulations in that area, which the court accepted.
Controversy over the devastation of the Tara River bed and banks has accompanied the construction of the priority section from Podgorica to Kolašin since the very beginning of the works. Civil society representatives and the professional community have accused the Chinese company of continuously destroying the river, which is under UNESCO protection, while they have criticized the competent institutions for poor monitoring of the works.
UNESCO representatives expressed concern about the construction of a highway on the Tara Riverbed in November 2018. After visiting the part of the Tara where the highway works were being carried out, they submitted a report in which they concluded that the area was “full of landfills and dumped material”, and that it was clear that the environmental impacts would remain visible even after the completion of the highway construction. Such conclusions were followed by reports from the European Commission and the European Parliament, which demanded urgent measures to rehabilitate the riverbed.
MANS filed several criminal charges and conducted numerous surveys and field surveys that showed that devastation had occurred on the Tara River, and that biodiversity and entire habitats had been significantly damaged. In 2018, MANS, together with environmental organizations, filed criminal charges against responsible persons in the Government of Montenegro, the Environmental Inspection, and the Chinese company CRBC for the devastation of the Tara River. Although they submitted evidence, the Supreme State Prosecutor's Office dismissed the charges.
Also, the Tara and Morača Sports Fishing Association sued CRBC, and the Basic Court in Podgorica ordered the company to pay them around 200 thousand euros in damages in 2021. The Higher Court, after an appeal by CRBC, overturned that ruling, but in its decision found that the company was guilty because it built facilities without the necessary documentation in 2019, thereby contributing to the destruction of wildlife in Tara.
As the Environmental Protection Agency previously explained, the greatest damage is reflected in the fact that the CRBC company physically displaced the river from its bed during the implementation of the project in the Tara 2 bridge zone, which may affect the morphological characteristics of the bed in the future. In addition to the redirection of the bed and the erosion of the left bank, as three key problems, the Agency also listed the deepening of the bed to a depth of about two meters, as well as the disruption of the geological base and the impact on biodiversity.
The damage was repaired by the Proposal for Remediation Measures and the Environmental Monitoring Program after the implementation of the measures, and out of the eight planned, CRBC fulfilled five remediation measures at the time. They relate to the restoration of part of the Tara riverbed and the surrounding terrain at the “Mateševo” interchange to its original condition. The remaining measures, the Agency claimed, relate to “the construction method of leveling the thalweg, or filling depressions with alluvial materials from the raised parts of the river valley bottom, and greening areas along the road.”
"The conclusion of the Tara River biodiversity monitoring report for 2023, which was submitted to the Agency by an accredited company, stated that the state of the Tara River ecosystem is continuing to recover, that is, it is far better than it was in 2022. There has been an increase in the number of individuals, and what particularly indicates an improvement is the presence of a larger number of younger populations. This is a sign of successful spawning and the establishment of stable populations in this ecosystem," the Agency said.
The official acknowledgement of the devastation came in October 2020, when the environmental inspection determined that CRBC had deepened and displaced part of the riverbed and undermined the left bank for a length of 500 meters. Since then, multiple requests have been filed against the Chinese company to initiate misdemeanor proceedings.
MANS then explained that the authorities had been hiding the truth from citizens for years.
"From the very beginning of the construction of the section along the Tara River Canyon, the Montenegrin public was assured that the Chinese company CRBC was not doing anything out of the ordinary, that there was no talk of devastation, that the riverbed had not been displaced, that everything we could see with our own eyes, which were illegal dumps of construction materials in the river and on the riverbank, was something that was normal and agreed upon. Later, especially after 2020, we realized that these were not isolated incidents, but that the Government, primarily the then Ministry of Environmental Protection and Spatial Planning, had full information about what the CRBC company was doing, that inspections were going out into the field, that there were certain fines, that no one was ever held criminally accountable, in a country that calls itself an ecological state," and that the Constitution explicitly states that "citizens of Montenegro have the right to full information about the state of the environment," he said earlier. Dejan Milovac.
He stated that "as far as this went, the best evidence is that a precedent was set that had not been recorded for any project before, which is that the Ministry declared the entire inspection supervision, all their findings, and minutes a secret, which is a violation of both the Constitution and the Law on Inspection Supervision, which guarantees that this type of supervision must be public."
The Chinese company was also sued by the Sports Fishing Society "Tara i Morača", which in April 2018 entered into an agreement with the Ministry of Agriculture on the use and management of this natural asset in the area of the municipality of Kolašin. The basic court in Podgorica in November 2021 asked the CRBC to pay about 200 euros in compensation to the fishermen. After the appeal of the Chinese company, the decision of the High Court overturned that verdict. In the verdict, however, it was stated that the company is guilty because in 2019, it started building facilities, without previously submitting an application and documentation for that work, which contributed to the destruction of fish and other living things in the Tara River.
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