Agency finds no grounds in Paunovic salary case

Serbia’s Anti-Corruption Agency will open no case over the salary that Snezana Paunovic, now minister of public administration and local self-government, reported for years as acting director of the Pec Pharmacy Institution. The institution was abolished by a government decision on October 7, 2021, and struck from the Serbian Business Registers Agency (APR). The Agency sent its written answer to newsrooms on July 31, 2026, at 5:56 p.m.

The wording is flat. There are, the Agency wrote, “no grounds for the Agency to act in relation to the subject of your question”. Its reasoning rests on the fact that the minister filed her asset and income declarations as the law requires, meaning the post itself was never hidden from the register.

Paunovic has held the ministry since April 15, 2025. Until that day she was acting director of the Pec Pharmacy Institution, a post she had held since 2014. The institution carried the name of a city it did not sit in. Its seat was in Gorazdevac, a Serb village nearby.

How does a post survive the body that held it?

The request to strike the institution from the register was filed by Paunovic herself, in her capacity as acting director. The body disappeared from APR records in October 2021, while the same directorship stayed attached to her name in the Anti-Corruption Agency register, salary figure included.

According to that register, she declared monthly earnings for the post ranging from 82,000 to 131,000 dinars. For 2023 and 2024 the declared monthly salary was 131,000 dinars, roughly 1,100 euros. Across eleven years in the job, about 146,000 euros was paid out of the budget on that basis.

Her asset and income reports reached the Agency on five dates:

• April 30, 2018
• May 11, 2023
• March 1, 2024
• April 17, 2024
• May 15, 2025

The last one came a month after she took over the ministry.

The Treasury kept the pharmacy on its books

The database of the Treasury Administration of the Ministry of Finance continued to list the Pec Pharmacy Institution as active long after the government decision. One state record therefore showed an institution that another state decision had already erased. That gap matters, because treasury records are where the accounts of budget beneficiaries and payments from them are tracked.

The portfolio Paunovic has run since April 2025 covers the state administration system itself, including registers and civil records. The minister now answers for the field in which a mismatch between two state lists went unnoticed for four years.

An earlier ruling and an earlier bill

This is not the first time her name has appeared in Agency files. The same institution found a breach of anti-corruption rules involving Paunovic in 2018, and the measure imposed was publication of the decision, the mildest sanction the law provides.

The Crime and Corruption Reporting Network (CINS) reported earlier that she had claimed about 22,000 euros in travel expenses from the National Assembly for the Belgrade to Pec route between 2016 and 2020. Same geography, same decade, same dual position: a lawmaker in Belgrade and a director of an institution in Kosovo and Metohija.

Paunovic has been a member of the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) since 1992 and served as deputy speaker of the National Assembly from August 2022 to April 2025. Through all of it, the directorship in Gorazdevac stayed in the register beside her parliamentary role.

The minister’s answer

Asked by reporters about payments made after the institution was closed, she kept it short: “With sincere respect, do not hold it against me, but I really have no comment, write whatever you want.” She had earlier called the story untrue and said that under Serbian law no one can draw two salaries.

The Agency’s decision closes the only administrative route open in this case outside the courts. What remains unanswered sits with the Ministry of Finance, which has not explained why its treasury database carried a defunct institution for four years, and with the government whose own decision abolished it.