After the KRIK portal published messages from the “Sky” application in which the former president of the Football Association of Serbia asked certain people to intimidate and even physically injure the former national football team member Nemanja Vidić so that he would not run for president of the FSS in 2021, no prosecution in Serbia responded.
This is not the first time that the prosecution ignores what investigative journalists publish, especially if those stories mention government officials or people close to the ruling party.
Thus, the prosecutor’s office did not initiate investigations even after KRIK published Sky correspondence between Novi Sad businessmen in which the brother of the President of Serbia, Andrej Vučić, the president of SNS, Miloš Vučević, and the controversial businessman from Kosovo, Zvonko Veselinović, are mentioned in an incriminating manner.
In addition to these examples, investigations were not initiated even after the discovery of many other media outlets.
The interlocutors of Danas believe that the prosecution would have to react after such stories are published, in order to determine the true factual situation, because they published information supported by evidence indicating that the actors of those stories committed some of the most serious crimes.
Rajić: The answer is simple – we don’t have a prosecutor’s office
Lawyer Jovan Rajić tells Danas that prosecutors’ offices are not responding because we practically do not have them.
“The answer to every question that has been put to me in the past couple of years, which starts with ‘Should the prosecution’ and ‘Why isn’t it doing it,’ is ‘Yes, it should’ and ‘Because we don’t have a prosecution’. Sky correspondence is used all over the world as evidence, and here it seems that in some cases they are not even sufficient as an indicator on the basis of which the prosecution would conclude that there is a reason to suspect that a criminal offense has been committed and on that basis at least invite some persons to an informative interview,” says Rajić.
He explains that this happens because both the prosecution and the police are in the function of state structures, those structures are ruled by the mafia and the people who are at the head of the mafia, and when these two, repeatedly confirmed and proven premises are combined, the conclusion is imposed that the prosecution and the police are controlled by the mafia, and the state.
“In such a situation, it is unreasonable to expect that politicians and businessmen close to the regime will answer for anything they do, and the consequence is that the president relativizes this whole situation and says, ‘I am not interested in Kokeza or Vidić.’ repeated – not to give his people”, the lawyer states.
Rajić also notes that the government that puts Slavisa Kokeza ahead of Nemanja Vidić has no chance of surviving.
“It is doomed to failure and self-destruction, even if the rest of us do nothing,” concludes our interlocutor.
Majić: The leading people in the prosecution were appointed to protect the regime, not legality
Judge Miodrag Majić of the Appellate Court in Belgrade tells Danas that the answer to the question of why prosecutors ignore texts like Krik’s is unfortunately always the same.
“The leading people in the prosecution were appointed to protect not legality, but the regime. Their only ‘quality’ is unquestioning loyalty to the regime,” says Majić.
He believes that this situation will remain until there are changes in society.
“That will not change until the release of the kidnapped society, the accountability of the people who participated in the capture of the judiciary and a radical change in the understanding of the role of the judiciary in society,” states Majić.
Ninic has already filed a criminal complaint
Lawyer Ivan Ninić did not want to wait for the reaction of the authorities, but to the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade filed a criminal complaint against Slavisa Kokeza, but also against NN police officers, because he suspects that they were in possession of Kokeza’s Sky correspondence, which they concealed and did not forward it to the competent prosecution.
Ninić filed a criminal complaint against Kokeza for criminal offenses of preparation of a criminal offense in connection with the criminal offense of aggravated murder.
In the explanation of the application, the lawyer stated that in 2020 Kokeza contacted a person who signs himself as “Felix” on the Sky application in order to get in touch with the Italian mafia, because Vidić was living in Milan at that time, to whom he said in a message: “We need to give some money to physically threaten this (Vidic) so that he will be scared, like a fly to kill him”, and that he hired people who installed a GPS on Vidić device in the car.
In the part of the report that refers to NN police officers, Ninić filed a criminal report for the criminal offense of abuse of official position in connection with the criminal offense of assisting the perpetrator after the crime has been committed.
In the explanation, the lawyer states that the police officers knowingly and deliberately failed to pass the evidence collected from international legal aid related to the “Sky” correspondence of Kokeza, which indicates the preparation of a serious murder, to the competent public prosecutor’s office in the form of a criminal report, and that instead of taking legal action, they hid the said evidence, enabled Kokeza not to be criminally prosecuted and thereby enabled him to leave Serbia without hindrance.
Our editorial office sent an email to the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade with the question of whether they will file a case or take some other measures and actions within their jurisdiction regarding the story published by the Crik portal, but we have not received an answer to that question.
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