Some employees of the Radio and Television of Montenegro (RTCG) have filed an additional criminal complaint with the Basic State Prosecutor's Office (ODT) in Podgorica against the President of the RTCG Council, Veselin Drljević, claiming that there are grounds for suspicion of the abuse of intellectual property rights, but also a broader pattern of actions that, as they claim, led to financial damage and a violation of the integrity of the Public Service Broadcaster.
The applicants recall that they had previously informed the Ethics Committee and the Ethics Board of the University of Montenegro about the alleged plagiarism of Veselin Drljević's doctoral dissertation, but that their initiatives were not considered due to the fact that the doctorate was obtained abroad.
As they state, the ODT informed them in September 2025 that, based on the report from January of the same year, case number 138/25 had been formed, and that an urgent request had been sent to the judicial authorities of Serbia to obtain the documentation necessary to continue the investigation.
The complainants believe that insisting exclusively on international legal assistance could lead to the passivization of institutions and further damage.
"We have made Drljević's 'doctorate' available for inspection and presented evidence. By comparing the original document of our Ministry of Tourism (which we have provided) and the alleged doctorate of Veselin Drljević, the copying is clearly visible. For such a view and perception of copying, it is not logical to seek the opinion of those who declared an illegitimate document to be original. Therefore, we have reasonable doubts that the institution that enabled Veselin Drljević to obtain a doctorate by copying 32 pages of the Master Plan of Montenegrin Tourism from 2008, neatly shredded, Cyrillicized and certified, will rush to submit evidence that would indicate their procedural sloppiness," the supplement to the application states.
They claim that Drljević, using an academic title acquired on the basis of, as they allege, plagiarized work, was elected as a member of the RTCG Council, and then as its president.
According to their allegations, it was the RTCG Council under Drljević's leadership that made the decisions that enabled the re-election of Boris Raonić as Director General of RTCG on June 1, 2023, despite, as they claim, the obvious failure to meet legal requirements.
The applicants recall several court rulings, but also the opinion of the Agency for the Prevention of Corruption (ASK) from March 2024, which assessed that the process of appointing Raonić represented a threat to the public interest and could have affected the integrity of RTCG.
ASK then concluded that the members of the RTCG Council must have known that Raonić could not have had the required ten years of work experience at the appropriate level of education, given that he graduated in 2018.
The agency recommended that the RTCG Council review decisions on the appointment of the Director General and in the future make decisions in a manner that will not raise suspicions of corruption risks.
The complainants also state that RTCG did not act on the recommendation of the ASK, and recall that the Agency informed the Parliament of Montenegro, the Special State Prosecutor's Office and the Directorate for Inspection Affairs about the case.
"ASK used all the mechanisms at its disposal," the applicants quote part of a later statement from the Agency from November 2025.
The supplement to the complaint also recalls two previous criminal charges filed in August and October 2024 against Drljević, certain members of the RTCG Council, Boris Raonić, and part of the RTCG legal service.
The complainants claim that all reported actions represent a continuation of causing financial damage to the Public Service and endangering the professional integrity of employees.
"We consider all these items - causing damage while gaining benefit, to be the actions of an organized criminal group, according to a sufficient number of items as described in the Criminal Code," the supplement to the report states.
They additionally point out that the RTCG management had around 100 million euros of public money at its disposal during the period to which the report relates, and express doubts about the legality of the adoption of the rulebook on the distribution of apartments and the contract on the construction and transfer of business premises in the RTCG building, announcing that these cases could also be the subject of separate reports.
"Therefore, we ask you to synchronously expand and dynamize the work of the prosecutor's office (hopefully with the cooperation of other state institutions) in accordance with the threat to social interest that is apparently being created on a daily basis by the self-proclaimed assistant professor Drljević (no longer just of questionable academic integrity) and persons from his managerial environment.
"Not wanting you to understand this as pretentious interference in someone else's business and speeding up the process, we believe that this address is fully in line with the layman's accepted "Slow justice, finished injustice", but also with the civil and professional obligation under Article 386 of the Criminal Code of Montenegro (failure to report a criminal offense and perpetrator)," conclude the filers of the criminal report.
The signatories of the criminal report are Srđan Čović, Časlav Vujotić and Mladen Vukčević.
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