Brajović's wife accompanied him on 25 official trips abroad

For several years, the non-governmental organization MANS has been trying to obtain data on the use of the state plane due to suspicions that the highest state officials often used it for private purposes as well. The change of government, on August 30 last year, did not bring about improvements in transparency on many levels. Thus, the new General Secretariat of the Government continued to hide information from the public that could indicate the abuse of state property.

On the other hand, the Parliament of Montenegro gave the MANS Research Center access to part of the data in its possession and related to flights realized in the period from 2016 to the end of 2021.

The largest part of the analyzed data refers to the former head of the parliament, Ivan Brajović, who used the state plane 42 times during his four years in office. Darko Pajović, in the five months that he was the head of the parliament, flew with this plane eight times, and the current president of the Parliament of Montenegro, Aleksa Bečić, flew twice in a year.

Analysis of data on Ivan Brajović reveals that the current leader of the Social Democrats often traveled accompanied by his wife Dragana Brajović, who accompanied him on as many as 25 official trips abroad. According to the requests for the use of the state plane, which were analyzed by MANS, Brajović's wife was an official part of the Montenegrin delegation six times, while as a so-called "delegation escort" she flew on the state plane 19 times.

As a member of the delegation, Dragana Brajović usually attended the protocol visits of Ivan Brajović, while outside the official protocol and at the expense of the citizens, the wife of the former head of the parliament visited: Rome, Rimini, Bratislava, Warsaw, Morocco, Tbilisi, Vienna, Baku, Geneva, Tallinn, Berlin , Zurich, Luxembourg, Ankara and Reykjavik.

It is also interesting that Ivan Brajović's wife flew on a "special flight" in several cases, while accompanying the delegation. on a state plane, while it was recorded that members of the delegation took commercial flights on those trips.

In response to questions from the MANS Research Center, the former head of parliament stated that he personally covered the costs of his wife's plane tickets when she was not a member of the delegation. However, in the documentation that MANS had access to, there is no information that Brajović's wife traveled on commercial flights. When asked for which flights he personally paid for his wife's ticket, Brajović did not want to answer.

"We received this information from the Assembly, which had no problem giving it to us, and it is somehow incomprehensible to us that, not even a year after the election of the new Government, the General Secretariat is still hiding this type of information from the citizens. We have a ruling from the Administrative Court that orders the General Secretariat to publish the data and in fact we see on which destinations the state plane was used, whether they were destinations that coincided with the duties of the president of the country, the prime minister, the president of the Assembly... or we had a situation where the state plane was used and for private purposes. I will remind you that we had so many affairs, which included Switzerland, some other countries, where state officials traveled. It would be very useful to finally receive information from the General Secretariat whether the state plane was actually used for official travel or private affairs. We still do not have information about the famous flight of President Đukanović to Paris and then to Miami, and what official work he, as he stated, performed on that occasion," said the director of the MANS Research Center, Dejan Milovac.

During his five-month mandate, the former head of parliament, Darko Pajović, was accompanied on eight trips by his advisers and translators, as well as cameramen and security.

According to the submitted documentation, the current speaker of the parliament, Aleksa Bečić, used the state plane twice during the year of his mandate, on flights to Ljubljana and Budapest. Unlike Brajović and Pajović, the documentation about Bečić's flights did not contain specific names and functions of the members of the delegation. In response to additional questions from MANS, Bečić's cabinet announced that the president was accompanied on official trips by state plane by advisers Sandra Radević and Dubravka Joksimović, videographers and translators, and deputy Boris Bogdanović, for whom the cabinet announced that "without compensation, with other members of the cabinet, helps the president in organizing receptions and visits".

The Government of Montenegro announced last week that the General Secretariat was ordered to publish information on the use of the state aircraft after obtaining the opinion of the National Security Agency. This decision was made after the National Council for Combating Corruption at a high level in early November recommended to the government that the mentioned data be published.