Canopy case files show president's cabinet in email trail
Court documents in the Novi Sad railway station canopy case contain emails between an indicted engineer and aides in the Serbian president's cabinet, dated from April 2018 to December 2024.
The indictment over the Novi Sad canopy collapse was filed on March 4, 2025, and until now the public knew little beyond the prosecutor’s name and the number of defendants. Court documents have now produced something else: an email trail in which aides from the Serbian president’s cabinet appear alongside one of the indicted engineers, with dates running from April 2018 to December 2024.
The indictment was signed by Aleksandar Milosevic, a prosecutor with the anti-corruption unit of the Belgrade Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office. Three people are charged:
- Slobodanka Katanic, a traffic engineer and assistant director at Infrastructure of Serbian Railways
- Milutin Savovic, a civil engineer with the firm Trioprojekt
- Biljana Krstic, a civil engineer with the firm SGS
The legal qualification covers three offences: negligent conduct in office, abuse of official position, and a grave act against public safety. The canopy came down on November 1, 2024, killing 16 people and seriously injuring one.
The contents of the correspondence were laid out on July 30, 2026, by Radar reporters Ognjen Radonjic and Vuk Z. Cvijic. The list of defendants has not changed. What has changed is what can now be said about who was following the rail project, and through whom.
Who wrote to whom on November 1
According to the documentation, Katanic sent an email to Natasa Vuksic, an aide to the president of Serbia, on the day the canopy fell. Correspondence between the two is also logged for November 22 and November 26, 2024, the weeks in which the public was demanding to know who signed off on the technical acceptance of the reconstructed station and when.
On December 6, 2024, Vuksic sent an email carrying a report on the Belgrade to Subotica line. That date matters on its own, because by then the responsible ministries were already under obligation to hand the reconstruction paperwork to prosecutors.
A price cut of 147 million euros
The trail does not stop in 2024. It reaches six years back. Imre Kern, a state secretary in the Construction Ministry, emailed then deputy prime minister Zorana Mihajlovic on April 13, 2018, about a price reduction of 147 million euros on the Novi Sad to Subotica to border section.
Four days later, on April 17, 2018, Ivica Kojic, the head of the president’s cabinet, asked for a comparative price analysis. The next day Mihajlovic was informed that the cabinet had approved the reduction. The sequence therefore places a decision on the cost of a state infrastructure project inside a communication chain that runs through the president’s cabinet, a body with no statutory authority over public procurement or railway infrastructure.
Why was the deadline moved to the end of 2024?
Because that is what was requested. On December 13, 2022, the president asked for the works to be finished earlier, by the end of 2024, and the consortium put the price of that acceleration at an extra 65 million dollars.
What the acceleration did on the ground shows up in the next entry. On January 9, 2023, the CRIC-CCCC consortium emailed Kojic about problems on the project. Not the ministry, not Infrastructure of Serbian Railways, but the head of the president’s cabinet. Kojic appears in the correspondence in 2018 and again in 2023, which makes him a standing address in this file rather than the accidental recipient of a single message.
What the emails mean legally
For the cabinet, formally, nothing yet. Nobody from the president’s cabinet has been charged in this case, and Vuksic and Kojic appear in the documents as participants in an exchange, not as defendants. The three engineers stand accused, not convicted, and the presumption of innocence holds until a final verdict.
Politically, the file reopens a question that outlives this one case: where the president’s constitutional function ends and where the operational running of state business begins, the part that the constitution and the laws assign to the government and its ministries. The president’s cabinet is not an administrative authority. It issues no rulings, conducts no administrative procedure, and answers to no parliamentary committee for the pace of work on a railway line.
The defence gains material it can use, since the correspondence supports the argument that decisions on price and deadlines were not being taken at the level of engineers from Trioprojekt and SGS. Prosecutors are standing by the indictment they filed nearly a year and a half ago. The date worth watching next is not one from the file but the opening of the main hearing, because only there will it become clear whether these emails are entered as evidence and whether anyone in the exchange is called to speak about them.
