Source: "Blic"
Exactly a year ago, an “explosion” of information on the fantastic wealth of bosses of Darko Saric’s drug cartel gave the Serbian public a glimpse of an “interesting” example of communication between public authorities. It was indeed very interesting, because it strongly resembled the children’s game of «broken telephones».
First the Administration for the Prevention of Money Laundering and the Financing of Terrorism publicly came up with an estimate that more than EUR 1,700,000,000 is “laundered” annually in Serbia, mainly through privatization. This equals one quarter of the total state budget!
Then the Privatization Agency informed the public that it has been submitting ‘a bunch’ of requests for information verification with regards to suspicious clients and transactions to the Administration for years, but to no avail. As a matter of fact, it received the requested information only once, even though it sent over 1769 requests to the Administration.
The Administration replied with an announcement that after July 2008 it has not received a single verification request from the Agency. The Agency, they say, in that period did not express any doubts as to where the money comes from or about the credibility of any of the privatization participants. And since April 2002, the Agency has submitted to the Administration only 2 requests!!
A “cherry on top” was a new announcement by the Agency, which repeated that it had submitted 1769 requests to the Administration and that the last one was submitted only days ago!!
Even for our general public, which is used to many odd things, this ‘high level of agreeableness’ was too much, which made me wonder in public: “What now? Would “the best” solution be to bring this matter to an end? To disregard such “trifles” as (lack of) existence of 1767 random requests. Should we be addressing ‘serious matters’, instead of conducting a ‘witch hunt’?. Or should we find answers to questions this story raises?” In the meantime, the Serbian public heard “new” information on Mr. Saric’s “successful acquisitions”, but it has not received answers to the above questions. Including the main question – the one concerning the results achieved by the “links in the chain” of our anti-money laundering mechanism. The public may or may not be aware that we have been building it for almost a decade and that it is not inexpensive at all; quite the opposite. But public awareness of the results it has achieved is virtually non-existent. And the public certainly has the right to know that.
