Tepic Demands Investigation Into DIPOS State Villa Contracts
Marinika Tepic, deputy leader of the Party of Freedom and Justice, has asked two prosecutor's offices to examine how state villas, apartments and land managed by DIPOS have been handled since 2012.
Contracts covering state villas, apartments and plots of land managed by the company DIPOS should undergo prosecutorial review going back to 2012, according to a request from Marinika Tepic, deputy leader of the Party of Freedom and Justice (SSP).
Tepic sent the request to the Prosecution for Organized Crime and the anti-corruption department of the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade, laying out her reasoning in a statement issued on Wednesday, August 5. The starting year was not picked at random, it is the year the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) took power. Tepic said the government of Prime Minister Djura Macut had allowed DIPOS, the limited liability company that manages state owned real estate, to conceal whether state property is still being sold without public tenders.
What the two prosecutor’s offices are being asked to do
Tepic specified that the review should cover every contract, every price, every name and every decision made at DIPOS since 2012. She named two people she said should answer to prosecutors: DIPOS’s current director Bojana Martinovic and her predecessor Djoka Krivokapic. According to Tepic, the two should be asked to explain whose orders approved the sale and lease of state real estate, who decided which individuals received preferential treatment, and why the public was denied the right to know how state property was being handled.
In the statement, she said:
We demand that the prosecution establish who decided to hide the contracts on state villas, tenants and prices from the public, and in whose interest state property became a secret. Why are Serbian citizens not allowed to know who received and bought state villas? The Serbian Progressive Party and its newly minted gentry, facing the end of their time in power, are trying to grab everything that remains in Belgrade’s most elite residential area, while the public is kept from knowing who the new tenants are, who the owners are, at what prices, and who approved decisions that made family ties and closeness to the top of government the ticket to state villas, plots of land in Dedinje and building permits.
The statement closes on that note, placing the exclusive Dedinje neighborhood at the center of the accusation.
As examples of people who, she said, easily gained possession of the most attractive state properties, Tepic named Nikola Petrovic, Slobodan Tesic, Milan Radoicic, Mohamed Dahlan and Aleksandar Kajmakovic. She added that the public learned of these cases rarely, and mostly only after journalists had investigated them.
Why did tenant names become confidential?
Because the company itself decided it that way, and defends those decisions on contractual grounds. Information about who currently leases the remaining state villas, and at what price, is treated as confidential, so neither tenant names nor rent amounts can be obtained through publicly available records. DIPOS has explained the confidentiality as an obligation it took on toward tenants, arguing that without protecting that data it could not pursue legal proceedings or collect outstanding debts.
The two sides do not disagree on the fact itself but on how to interpret it. That the data is closed off is not in dispute. What is disputed is whether that closure is a legal necessity or a shield.
Context comes from an investigation Radar published in late July. According to that reporting, of roughly 40 villas DIPOS was leasing eleven years ago, about half are now privately owned. Tepic’s request, then, does not land on an untouched portfolio, but on what remains of one.
How much weight does this kind of request carry
A request from an opposition party carries no force of an order. The decision on whether to open a preliminary inquiry rests solely with the prosecution, based on its own assessment and without any obligation to explain that assessment publicly. That means SSP achieves its political effect before any prosecutor responds, since the Dedinje issue returns to public debate regardless of the outcome.
Neither DIPOS nor the Serbian government had issued a public response to the accusations by the time this article was published. The Serbian Progressive Party likewise did not respond to the claim that state property is being sold off before the end of its term.
The next verifiable step is straightforward: the day one of the two prosecutor’s offices confirms the request has been filed and is being acted upon. Until that happens, this is a statement, not an investigation.
