The case of Veselin Delić is specific not only because the current president of the Mojkovac municipality received a half-year suspended sentence for illegal employment, but also because he was charged with it by the Special State Prosecutor's Office, which mainly prosecutes cases of high-level corruption and serious crime.
"I don't know if the prosecution's intention was to make an example out of this particular case so that everything that happened in that case for Mr. Delić would somehow be a deterrent for other presidents, municipal presidents, mayors. We have not had such a practice so far, nor have we had a practice of simply punishing those public officials, the proceedings that were conducted against them deterring other public officials, but we see that, as I said, all that bad practice that has been established is actually continuing," says Dejan Milovac from MANS.
According to the Higher Court ruling, Delić was found guilty of appointing the heads of the Municipal Police and the Protection and Rescue Service in Mojkovac in 2022, even though he knew they did not meet the legal requirements. He is the first mayor of a municipality to receive a non-final prison sentence for illegal employment, but he is not the only one to be accused of this:
"I think that SDT should be much more involved in this regard, because there are certainly many more cases like this. And I think that when it comes to this case specifically, it is a message to all other presidents of local governments that they can also come forward," says Ines Mrdović from the Action for Social Justice.
The most famous ongoing court case, which deals with how individual mayors have employed in the past, is that of Ljoro Nrekić, the former mayor of Ulcinj from the DPS, who is accused of hiring several people in that municipality in 2020, without a job vacancy announcement.
"We have seen that political hiring, hiring outside of a competitive examination, is something that has been normalized to a large extent. So, after the promise in 2020 to end the previous practice, we actually had a continuation of these practices with a, let's say, ubiquitous explanation that they did it before them," says Milovac.
Although he did not employ illegally like his colleague from Mojkovac, former mayor of Kolašin, Milosav Bulatović from the DPS, also received a suspended prison sentence because he used municipal money, which he later reimbursed from his own pocket, to pay for a fellow citizen's training as a municipal police officer. He then resigned.
Illegal employment in city services is not at the top of the list of "greatest sins" for which municipal presidents have been criminally prosecuted, before and after the change of government in 2020.
While some were accused of organized crime and drug trafficking (Milo Božović), some were in prison for fraud that caused municipalities like Budva millions in damage (Kuljača, Lazar Rađenović), others are charged with abuse of authority in the economy and other abuses of official position (Žarko Pavićević, Vuka Golubović). There were municipal leaders who were acquitted because the courts did not find hate speech in their statements or illegal handling of state property in their decisions (Marko Kovačević).
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