For more than half a year, the General Secretariat of the Government has refused to remove the secrecy mark from the decisions of the Cabinet of the Government Duško Marković from 2019 and 2020 on payments from the current budget reserve, some of which were brought during the so-called of the technical mandate of the outgoing government.
The Network for the Affirmation of the Non-Governmental Sector requested, on the basis of the Law on Free Access to Information, decisions related to payments from the current budget reserve, but for now it is not known what the amounts are because the previous General Secretariat marked them as "confidential". and the new one continued with the same practice.
In the document rejecting the request of MANS, signed by the General Secretariat of the Government Zdravka Krivokapića, it is stated that all the decisions of the inner cabinet were declared secret in advance in 2012, based on the decision of the then prime minister Igor Lukšić.
According to the documents, the General Secretariat of Krivokapić's Government first claimed that it did not have the requested documents, although MANS in its requests indicated specific reference numbers and dates when the mentioned decisions of the Cabinet were made.
A few months later, the decision of the Agency for the Protection of Personal Data and Free Access to Information admits in its decision that the requested decisions still exist, but that they are labeled "confidential".
According to the Decree on the Government of Montenegro, the Cabinet consists of the President, Vice-Presidents and Secretary General of the Government, or in case of disputed decisions, Duško Marković, Milutin Simovic, Zoran Pazin, (deceased) Rafet Husovic and former general secretary Nataša Pešić.
In MANS, they believe that none of these categories of spending state money should be secret, but also that, bearing in mind the previous practice before the elections, the motives of Duško Marković's inner cabinet to put the mark "confidential" on the decisions on payments are clear. ".
"MANS continuously points out that the best international practice dictates that all information about how money from the budget is spent must be available to all citizens, with exceptions that are well defined so as not to leave room for abuses such as we have the opportunity to see in this case, the director of the Research Center of MANS Dejan Milovac. He adds that in the previous period, "too often we witnessed situations when the previous government used the budget reserve for the payment of social assistance before the elections".
"...Donations to municipalities where elections are held, public works and similar activities, which were predominantly carried out by DPS, so-called institutional advantage. This is precisely why the inertness of the new government when it comes to the efforts of civil society and the media to make as much information as possible about bad practices, especially those that lead to the spending of citizens' money, to be published publicly and transparently," emphasizes Milovac.
The regulation stipulates that "the cabinet can decide on the use of funds from the current budget reserve, in accordance with the criteria established by the Government".
However, the Rulebook on closer criteria for the use of funds from the current and permanent budget reserve defines only the types and amount of expenses that can be hidden from the reserve, but not the criteria on the basis of which decisions on the payment of these funds would be made.
MANS warns that the situation is the same with the decisions of Vlado Marković's inner cabinet, which were not only discretionary and made without publicly known criteria, but are still kept as a state secret.
That organization has also previously analyzed misuse of budget funds for electoral purposes.
According to the Rulebook on closer criteria for the use of the budget reserve, funds from this budget item can be used for "providing missing funds for consumer units, assistance to legal entities and assistance to natural persons for treatment, education, improvement of the material situation (social assistance)".
"It is unacceptable that the new executive power, which sees itself as 'the most transparent Government in the history of Montenegro', continues in this way to conceal information that can only be answered by those who made decisions to the detriment of the budget and the interests of citizens in the previous 30 years." says Milovac and adds that there are many reasons for concern when it comes to the publicity of the work of state institutions, but also when it comes to the long-awaited reform in this area.
"It would not be good at all if taking over and continuing bad practices in the area of spending state funds were one of the key reasons for the now obvious lack of political will to completely reform the area of free access to information, both at the level of legislation and concrete practices. Therefore, MANS calls on the General Secretariat and the Government to immediately remove the markings from all decisions of the lower cabinet that refer to the spending of funds from the budget," said Milovac.
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