Tepic: European Serbia Vows Fund for Regime Victims

Marinika Tepic, one of the two candidates leading the European Serbia electoral list (the other being Zdravko Ponos), said on Thursday, September 18, that compensating victims of the regime would be one of the list’s first moves if it takes power. The money for that purpose, according to Tepic, would come from a Fund for the Recovery of Looted Money, filled exclusively with assets seized from officials suspected of corruption.

The message was aimed directly at citizens: the funds would not come out of the budget they fill with their salaries and pensions. Tepic framed this as a break from past practice, where campaign pledges are typically announced as a cost to the state treasury.

How Would the Fund Be Funded?

According to the announcement, the fund would be financed entirely through the uncompromising enforcement of the Law on the Origin of Assets and the permanent seizure of illegally acquired wealth from corrupt officials and people connected to them. That law already exists in Serbia’s legal system, and European Serbia, according to this announcement, sees it as the main instrument for filling the new fund, not as grounds for new borrowing or for redistributing the existing budget.

Tepic does not present the fund as a campaign promise in the usual sense, but rather, as she put it, as a moral, political and legal debt to the thousands of citizens who endured years of institutional, political and economic persecution.

“Dismantling the corrupt apparatus and freeing the captured state require uncompromising measures, so the future justice system will focus on three key groups that carried the heaviest burden of autocracy: victims of political persecution and repression, victims of economic blackmail and party pressure, and citizens harmed by corrupt projects,” Marinika Tepic said.

Three Groups of Beneficiaries

Based on the announcement, money from the fund would go to three categories of citizens. The first are victims of political persecution and repression: whistleblowers, journalists, activists and others who were arrested, prosecuted or pursued for defending the truth, the law or the public interest. The second group covers workers in the public and private sectors who, according to the announcement, were unlawfully dismissed, suspended or demoted for refusing to bow to party pressure or blackmail. The third group consists of citizens left without property, or whose property was devalued or put at risk, through questionable expropriations, unlawful contracts and environmentally damaging projects.

Tepic added a direct appeal to citizens about where the money would come from.

“I want to send a completely clear and direct message to the citizens of Serbia: the funds for this fund will not be taken from Serbia’s budget, which you fill with your salaries and pensions. The fund will be financed entirely through the uncompromising application of the Law on the Origin of Assets and the permanent seizure of illegally acquired wealth from corrupt officials and people connected to them,” Tepic said, according to Nova.

No statement so far has specified how much money the fund would actually have at its disposal, or how individual payouts would be calculated. None of the three sources tracked for this report offers that detail, leaving open the question of how the measure would work in practice, beyond the declarative level on which it has been presented.

Context of the Election Cycle

European Serbia is made up of the Party of Freedom and Justice, SRCE and Solidarity, and the list is led, alongside Tepic, by Zdravko Ponos. The fund announcement comes in the middle of the campaign ahead of the vote scheduled for October 25, when, according to this pledge, the first steps after an election win would target compensation for regime victims rather than the economic issues that election lists traditionally put at the top of their campaigns.

There has been no reaction from the ruling coalition or from other electoral lists to this announcement as of publication.