Anti-graft council names six bodies withholding files

Miroslav Milicevic, who chairs Serbia’s Anti-Corruption Council, told the FoNet news agency on August 1 that six state and public institutions have refused to hand the council documents on infrastructure projects. His statement went out at 1:17 p.m., exactly 21 months after the station canopy in Novi Sad came down and killed 16 people.

The council is an advisory body of the Serbian government and formally works for it. This is the first time Milicevic has put names to the refusals. The institutions that withheld documents, he said, are:

• the Republic Geodetic Authority
• the Finance Ministry
• the Tax Administration
• the City of Belgrade
• Telekom Srbija
• Srbijagas

Between them, those bodies hold the land registry, tax records, municipal paperwork and data on telecom and gas infrastructure. Without that material, the money trail of a large state project cannot be traced backwards.

Why the case has stalled for 21 months

Milicevic listed three reasons for the delay: complex forensic expert reports, the sheer number of parties involved in the Belgrade-Subotica railway modernisation, and poor access to documents. Right after the collapse, the council asked the Organised Crime Prosecutor’s Office to examine every financial flow and the responsibility of everyone who took part in the project.

“The key question is the full independence of the judiciary and the ability to establish responsibility without political pressure”

The blockage Milicevic describes also has a number attached to it, one we have reported before. Between January 2025 and the end of March 2026, the Organised Crime Prosecutor’s Office sent police 180 requests for information and received 63 answers. The investigation into Goran Vesic, Tomislav Momirovic and others covers 14 people, with damage to the budget estimated at around 115 million dollars. Milicevic’s list of six institutions and the prosecutors’ ratio of 180 to 63 describe the same wall from two sides.

Recommendations the government did not take up

The council receives no invitations to sit on the working groups that draft anti-corruption legislation, even though several documents provide for its participation. The recommendations the government has not accepted concern:

• transparency of infrastructure projects
• publication of all contracts and financial flows
• enforcement of the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance

The sharper complaint is not about any single recommendation. It is that no deadline exists. The government is under no obligation to respond to a council report, so silence carries no consequence.

“To this day no mechanism has been established that would oblige the government to respond to every council report within a set deadline”

The council has been flagging systemic corruption for more than two decades. In the same statement, Milicevic said where he believes the problem sits.

“The law is bent most of all in the places where political power is greatest, among those who can pass it, interpret it or block its application”

The council has no investigative powers. It cannot order a document to be handed over, cannot open proceedings and cannot penalise an institution that stays silent. Its one instrument is the public report, and the public report is precisely what the government need not answer.

“The fight against corruption cannot succeed if the institutions that point to problems are left without real influence”

What is new after this statement is the list itself: the institutions that do not answer are now named in public. In the judicial track, the next step is the forensic expert findings, and no deadline has been set for them.