Jovan Aleksić, a lawyer from Vranje, has filed a criminal complaint against the city’s mayor, Slobodan Milenković, accusing him of the criminal offense of “abuse of office,” MP Slobodan Petrović announced.
Aleksić sent the criminal complaint on Monday, January 5, to the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office (HPPO) in Niš, specifically its Special Department for Combating Corruption, Vranje News reported.
Petrović specified that the case concerns the alleged “misuse of non-repayable financial assistance from European Union funds amounting to €248,989.”
“As the year begins, so it will continue, as our people say.
May all your years be like this one, so that, to our great relief, you spend every New Year from now on in good health, in the place where you should have been long ago,” MP Petrović told the mayor.
In addition to the mayor, Aleksić also filed a criminal complaint against his unidentified associates, employees of the Vranje City Administration, on suspicion that they acted as co-perpetrators in committing the criminal offense of “abuse of office,” as defined in Article 359, paragraph 3, in connection with paragraph 1 of the Criminal Code.
Court ruling obliges the City of Vranje to repay the money
It should be recalled that a ruling by the Higher Court in Vranje, which became final in March 2024 and enforceable on April 25 last year, ordered the City of Vranje to pay the plaintiff, the Republic of Serbia, specifically the Department for Contracting and Financing EU-funded Programmes, “the amount of €248,989.50 as payment for funds acquired without legal grounds, within 15 days of receiving the written copy of the judgment.”
The defendant, the City of Vranje, was also ordered to pay the Republic of Serbia 211,500 dinars in legal costs, together with interest calculated from the date the judgment became enforceable until payment, also within 15 days of receiving the written copy of the ruling.
The court’s explanation states that representatives of the Republic of Serbia said in their lawsuit and during the proceedings that they had previously “issued a call for applications for non-repayable funding, with the aim of promoting the sustainable development of less developed areas of the Republic of Serbia by creating a more favourable environment for business growth and infrastructure development, thereby encouraging employment and social security.”
The defendant, the City of Vranje, submitted an application for the allocation of the funds in question on May 26, 2017, for the construction of an access road in the Vranje Free Zone.
Following the evaluation of the submitted applications, grant agreements were signed with municipalities and cities, including the City of Vranje, with which Grant Agreement No. 48-00-00164/2014-28-11 was concluded on May 26, 2017.
In its lawsuit, the Republic of Serbia stated that, after the agreement had been signed, a report of irregularities accompanied by supporting documentation was submitted by the IPA Unit of the Ministry of European Integration. The report stated that irregularities had been discovered during an on-site inspection on December 6.
Following that inspection, as further explained in the judgment, an administrative review was carried out by the Audit Authority for Irregularities and Verification of EU Funds on two occasions: first on February 8, and then again on February 13, 2019.
During these reviews, “numerous irregularities were discovered, as detailed in the Report on the Assessment of Irregularity Indicators dated April 8, 2019,” Vranje News reported. The outlet also published an image of the criminal complaint filed.
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Source: Nova.rs Foto: Grad Vranje
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