Deputies of the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) and Social Democrats of Montenegro (SD), who were stripped of their immunity by the Parliament in the case of the allocation of apartments and housing loans, have already hired lawyers and will be heard.
This is what the spokesman of the Special State Prosecutor's Office (SDT) Vukas Radonjić told Television Vijesti, who suspects that the members of the Government Commission for Housing Affairs assigned apartments and loans on favorable terms contrary to the regulations of the time, which they denied.
While many citizens pay off housing loans every month, with installments of 200 to 400 euros, many public officials also do so, but at much lower installments.
Thus, the arrested former president of the Commercial Court, Blažo Jovanić, pays the state 40 euros and 41 cents per month for a loan of 40.000 euros, which was once granted to him by the Government Commission headed by the current DPS MP Predrag Bošković.
He, as well as his colleagues Dragica Sekulić and Suzana Pribilović, and Ivan Brajović and Damir Šehović from the SD, were stripped of their immunity by the Assembly on April 19 because the SDT suspects them of abusing their position when awarding apartments and housing loans on favorable terms.
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"I hope that, as in other cases where the Parliament removed immunity, we will not wait for years to have some concrete results, although with some reserved optimism we are talking about the fact that a good part of that documentation has been destroyed, although we are talking about the potential damage to the state budget that is measured of several tens of millions of euros," Dejan Milovac from the Network for the Affirmation of the Non-Governmental Sector (MANS) told Vijesti Television.
In 2017, the arrested former president of the Supreme Court, Vesna Medenica, requested a 30.000 euro loan from the Government Commission for the reconstruction of the house, claiming that she "couldn't provide the money in any other way", even though she received 2.800 euros a month. Of the 33.000 euros paid, she was not obliged to return a single cent. Two years before that, she gave her daughter an 80-square-meter apartment in the Vektra building, which she also received from the state. Milovac says that while the SDT is investigating the work of the Housing Commission, the following procedures should be conducted in parallel.
"For a certain number of them, such as Vesna Medenica and some other public officials, it has already been proven that even with what the regulations were then, those loans and apartments were granted illegally, so certain individual cases can already be processed and passed of this criminal procedure, i.e. the protector of property and legal relations already has enough grounds to demand from those persons a return to their previous state, i.e. the return of those apartments if possible or payment at the market price," said Milovac.
Prosecutor Vukas Radonjić, who is acting in this case, told Television Vijesti that the questioning of the suspects is in order.
"Individual suspects took defense attorneys who submitted powers of attorney to the SDT and notifications about their residence and residence addresses and phone numbers. The further course of the procedure implies ensuring the presence of the suspects for questioning," said Radonjić.
During the discussion on the removal of immunity, the suspected members of parliament denied guilt, saying that they shared loans and apartments in accordance with the law and that this is a political reckoning of the current government with them.
"The policy of allocating apartments is not the policy of Predrag Bošković, Ivan Brajović, Damir Šehović, Dragica Sekulić, Suzana Pribilović, or all the others who are included in this criminal report, but a state policy that was not only from '16 to '20, but from 1945. forward," Bošković said on December 22, 2022.
The criminal complaint regarding the apartments was filed in 2019 by the organization Alternativa Crna Gora, but the SDT during the time of Milivoj Katnić rejected it, and the Government of Dritan Abazović filed it again in October last year.
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