MANS requests that the Government of Montenegro remove the confidentiality mark from the data on officials who were granted apartments and favourable loans from the Government of Montenegro for solving their housing issues before 2016.
After the announcement who are the officials the current Government took care of, there is no doubt that this information cannot be kept secret on any basis, instead, it is hidden only to prevent citizens from finding out that our money is being spent to reward loyal staff.
Therefore, after two court verdicts of the Administrative Court of Montenegro in favour of the right of the public to know, we ask the Government to finally publish all information.
We remind the public and the Government of Montenegro that in 2016, MANS requested from the Housing Commission of the Government of Montenegro all decisions and contracts on approved housing loans for public officials for the period from 2012 to 2015, but we were denied access to this information by the decision of the then President of the Commission, Predrag Bošković.
In his decision, Bošković said that the Commission did not have the aforementioned documentation in its possession, since the new body was formed only in 2015, and that they did not inherit anything from the previous commission. Regarding the loans for 2015, Bošković stated that the information was classified, i.e. it was given “internal” mark.
As a reason for hiding this information from the public, Bošković said that disclosing who received a loan from the Government “would cause adverse consequences for an interest that is more important than the public’s interest in knowing that information” and that it would “threaten the internal functioning of the authorities”, in this case the Housing Commission.
MANS filed an appeal to Bošković’s decision and won the case before the Administrative Court which ordered adoption of a new, lawful decision. In its verdict of February 2017, the Administrative Court stated that the Commission was not a new body not to have documentation before 2015 for these reasons, that it had been established much earlier, and that only the new chairperson and members were elected in the mentioned year.
The Administrative Court also rejected the reasons for declaring this information classified, saying that the reasons for jeopardizing the functioning of the Commission’s work cited by Bošković were not clear enough, and that valid arguments were necessary to mark it “internal”.
It took Bošković eight months to act on the decision of the Administrative Court and issue a new decision, in which he claimed the same, as well as that publishing of information that Montenegrin citizens have the right to know would harm the interests of Montenegro.
MANS filed an appeal to the Administrative Court regarding this decision of Bošković as well, and the second verdict in our favour was adopted at the end of April this year. The Court confirmed that it was unacceptable that the Commission had no documentation for the loans granted before 2015, and once again confirmed that Bošković and the Commission had violated the Law on Classified Information, and that the reasons why the credit information was classified as secret were still unclear.
More than four months have passed since this verdict was adopted, and the Commission has still not issued a new decision.
Once again, we ask the Government of Montenegro to announce which officials and under what conditions received loans and apartments before 2016!
MANS
