Justice Minister Nela Kuburović appeared as a guest on the show Good morning, Serbia with Milomir Marić and Katarina Korša as show hosts.
Q: What is the status on the Origin of Property Act?
A: One of the first assignments I received in 2016 – which was a shared assignment with the Ministry of Finance - was to produce a draft Origin of Property Act. Immediately, a working group was formed, and solid progress was being made. By the time the draft framework was completed, another assignment became priority: the Organisation and Competence of Government Authorities to Fight Organised Crime, Terrorism, and Corruption Act, which necessitated a restructuring of the prosecution and the courts, setting-up special departments handling corruption cases. The Origin of Property Act was an umbrella law which was to establish a new working system for organs with purview to prosecute crimes with elements of corruption, and afterwards were we to finalise the text of the Act.
Q: To which time period will the Act apply?
A: One of our proposals was to investigate property going back 10 years. We will see what the conclusions of the public debate will be. In this case, property investigation would entail checking whether property was acquired legally or illegally, and whether taxes on the legally acquired property was paid. The Tax Administration will certainly be busy.
In 2002, there was also the possibility of cross-checking property, but in practice that statute fell short of desired results. It was not clear or precise how the procedure was to be conducted. On the other hand, there were no registers adequate to conduct a property cross-check back then. Today, we have electronic registers holding nearly all data necessary to help us determine what someone owns. The most important thing to establish is the real value of the property and property revenue.
Q: What penalties will be in place for anyone with a disbalance?
A: Once a great disbalance is found between property revenue and real value, the difference of what was reported and unreported will be the taxable base. We propose it be set at 75% which, although very high, will in way serve as a penalty for those who failed to report everything they owned or who had illegally acquired property.
Additionally, if during the process the Tax Administration were to find elements of crime it will have to share its findings with the competent government authorities. That is when the special departments for fighting corruption enter the scene.
Q: Is it possible for anyone who concealed property to report it before the process starts?
A: I do not believe this Act will allow for this. What often creates confusion among citizens is that this Act only applies to public officials. In fact, the Act will apply to everyone, anyone who may raise suspicion given their life-style choices that they own much more than they reportedly earn or that their place of work does not explain their life-style of choice.
Ways to conceal property are many. So many things are deemed property; it is not only real-estate which can be easily identified, as well as company shares and stocks. We have had instances some have tried to explain their property as ‘borrowed money’. Essentially, this Act enables those who borrowed to immediately raise suspicion and get on the Tax Administration’s radar. There is also the Anti-Corruption Agency Act which in away keeps a register of property owned by public officials and related persons, all of whom are obliged to report report.
Q: We have certain wealthy individuals and a poor country – a topic discussed for decades. Were there examples of unemployed persons, or persons registered with social welfare services who ran actual empires?
A: We have had individuals who acquired fortunes and increased their private capital while performing high functions. That was the time to start looking into the matter. The first question asked is: how could that property grow so rapidly when you are only an official?; You must freeze all your management rights in the respective institutions.; How did the company perform and how is it that such a high profit margin was achieved? The Tax Administration will get involved once it finds something is “off” when verifying different data, and once it finds reasonable grounds of suspicion upon receiving anonymous reports from citizens.
Q: When will the statutes imposing harsher sentences for the most serious crimes, life-imprisonment, enter parliamentary procedure? That is what is expected now, no?
A: The designated working group is working hard on and it is expected to submit a proposal in February. What is relevant is that everything which had been announced will be followed through: the introduction of new criminal sanctions like life-imprisonment and making sentencing policy harsher. We may even be able to facilitate harsher sentences for crimes we did not announce, such as crimes involving rape, the production of narcotics, and others. The very introduction of a life-imprisonment sentence is owed to the Jurić Foundation initiative. Unfortunately, the Ministry missed this important matter back in 2015 when it was working on the amendments to the Criminal Code, and the community of experts remained silent on the matter; no one wished to explicitly state their views.
The Justice Minister concluded the interview by saying:
“It is a fact that proceedings lasting over 10 years raise alarms. It begs the question: why did it take that long and did it end with an acquittal because of insufficient evidence? Why was this not determined earlier in the proceedings, especially when those were conducted before the courts for organised crime with multiple plaintiffs being convicted in a single case, and with extremely high court fees? When you pose these questions, you find yourself having to pay millions in damages. Following these proceedings, over 1 billion dinars in damages alone were paid in the past several years.”