Police answered 63 of 180 requests in railway case
A year after the Organized Crime Prosecutor's Office opened its inquiry into the Novi Sad to Kelebija railway contract, 117 of its 180 requests to police are still unanswered.
Serbia’s railway graft inquiry turns one year old today, and not a single step that would close it has been completed. The Organized Crime Prosecutor’s Office (JTOK) issued the order opening the investigation on August 1, 2025. Fourteen people are under suspicion, and the estimated loss to the state budget stands at 115 million dollars.
In that time the office sent 180 requests for information to the police unit that handles organized crime. It got 63 answers back. The count runs from January 2025 to the end of March 2026, so it covers several months before the investigation was formally opened.
Who is under suspicion
Two former construction ministers are among the fourteen, Goran Vesic and Tomislav Momirovic. Prosecutors suspect that contract annexes allowed the Chinese contractors CRIC and CCC to bill separately for certain works with no public tender. The job in question is the modernization and reconstruction of the Novi Sad, Subotica, Kelebija line, one of the costliest infrastructure contracts Serbia signed in the past decade.
The charge under investigation is abuse of office. None of the fourteen is guilty until a final court ruling says so.
Why has the railway inquiry stalled?
Because the paperwork that would close it has not arrived. The most recent requests went out in April 2026, to the Criminal Police Directorate and the Tax Police, and no complete reports have come back on either.
Asked by reporters where the case stands, the prosecutor’s office kept its answer short:
as of this moment, the prosecutor’s office has not received all the documentation necessary to conclude the investigation
The same answer named a second reason for the delay: members of the Strike Group were pulled out of three bodies, the police, the Tax Police and the Administration for the Prevention of Money Laundering. The Strike Group is not a formality. It is the working team that gives a prosecutor investigators on the ground and direct access to financial records, which is what turns a request into work someone actually does. Remove those people and the prosecutor is left holding paper.
Expert reviews of the contract documentation have been ordered but are not finished either.
Two cases, one station
The financial track has stalled while the criminal case over the Novi Sad station canopy collapse has moved. We wrote earlier about the indictment in that case and how the trail reaches the president’s office. The two proceedings look at the same building from opposite sides. One asks who is answerable for the deaths. The other asks where the money went.
The gap in pace can be measured. The canopy case has an indictment. The railway case, a year in, has 117 requests the police have not answered.
What comes next
No deadline exists that would kill the investigation on its own, but every month without reports from the Criminal Police Directorate and without completed expert reviews narrows what a prosecutor can still prove, because records on deals up to seven years old get harder to reconstruct. The next date worth watching is not a hearing but a delivery: the reports on those April requests.
Until they arrive, one ratio describes this case, 180 to 63.
