The Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime (TOK) confirmed for N1 that Minister of Culture Nikola Selaković failed to appear on Friday at the scheduled hearing, without providing any justification.
He was supposed to be questioned as a suspect within the investigation that TOK is conducting in the “General Staff” case, due to which the Prosecutor’s Office has for weeks been exposed to unprecedented pressure and targeting by the highest state officials.
Minister Selaković did not justify his absence, which means that his defense attorney, whose presence is mandatory when a suspect is being questioned, also did not come to the Prosecutor’s Office to explain the reasons for the absence.
Likewise, the former Minister of Justice did not even send a letter to the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime to explain why he could not appear, although media reports yesterday stated that he had been visiting municipalities in southern Serbia.
This has created the legal grounds for the prosecutor to order that Minister Selaković be brought in for questioning, meaning that the police may go to retrieve him in order to secure his presence.
If, for example, police do not locate the suspect before the hearing, in that case the prosecutor may order his arrest.
To recall, in the “General Staff” case the Prosecutor’s Office suspects the Director of the Republic Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments, Goran Vasić, the acting Director of the City Institute Aleksandar Ivanović, and the Secretary in the Ministry of Culture Slavica Jelača, of committing the extended criminal offense of abuse of official position.
In May 2025, before the prosecutor, Goran Vasić admitted to falsifying documentation on the basis of which the Government of Serbia adopted the Decision on the Termination of Cultural Property Status for the General Staff buildings and removed them from the register of cultural assets.
BIRN recently reported that Aleksandar Ivanović, in his statement before the prosecutor, described how Minister of Culture Nikola Selaković repeatedly demanded that he submit a “proposal” for removing the protected status from the General Staff, even though he had no authority to issue such a document, while the Ministry of Culture also requested that he personally write the explanation, because the Director of the Republic Institute “was not capable” of doing it.
Incidentally, the very investigation in the “General Staff” case is one of the reasons why this Prosecutor’s Office has been intensely discredited.
Due to this investigation, President Vučić stated that certain prosecutors for organized crime deal with “fabricated cases” and addressed them insultingly as a “criminal gang,” “the worst criminals,” “the mafia,” prompting the TOK Collegium to issue two strongly worded public reactions.
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