Montenegro PM Djukanovic Named ‘Criminal Of The Year’ In Poll

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By Sinisa Jakov Marusic

The Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project – a network of investigative centres, media outlets and journalists – has handed Montenegro’s Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic a far-from-flattering New Year’s award.

Its annual poll saw the long-standing Montenegrin strongman narrowly beat the wife and children of Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev for the “award” of “Person of the Year in Organized Crime”.

Another Balkan leader, Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, came third.

“We see this as a lifetime achievement award,” OCCRP’s editor and co-founder, Drew Sullivan, said.

“Nobody outside of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has run a state that relies so heavily on corruption, organized crime and dirty politics. It is truly and thoroughly rotten to the core,” Sullivan said of Djukanovic’s regime.

Over a political career that has lasted almost three decades, Djukanovic has constantly either been a prime minister or a head of state.

“While he casts himself as a progressive, pro-Western leader who recently helped his country join NATO and is on track to join the European Union, he has built one of the most dedicated kleptocracies and organized crime havens in the world,” the OCCRP maintains.

Nominating Djukanovic this year was Vanja Calovic, director of the Network for Affirmation of NGO Sector, MANS, a civil society organization at loggerheads with the Montenegrin government.

Calling the Prime Minister “the last European dictator”, Calovic said he had “captured our country for his own private interests and turned it into safe haven for criminals. While he, his family and friends enriched themselves, ordinary people suffer from poverty, injustice and lawlessness, while those who dare to talk about the corruption become his targets.”

Finishing a close second and third in the poll respectively were the wife and children of Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev and the Macedonian Prime Minister, Gruevski.

“The relatives of the Azerbaijani president own large chunks of the country’s economy and have worked to plunder the economy at the expense of the people,” the OCCRP says by way of explanation.

As for Prime Minister Gruevski who has run Macedonia for nine years and is accused for a plethora of corrupt affairs, OCCRP mentions only some of them.

“The Macedonian PM has wiretapped opposition parties and journalists, prosecuted political opponents and whitewashed murder investigations,” it says.

Previous winners of the annual OCCRP poll have been Russian President Vladimir Putin, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, and the Romanian Parliament.

The OCCRP, founded by Drew Sullivan and Paul Radu in 2006, is a network of 22 investigative reporting organisations funded by the Open Society Foundations, the US Agency for International Development, the Swiss government, the National Endowment for Democracy and other donors.

Umberto Sulpasso

The Balkan Insight (formerly the Balkin Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN) is a close group of editors and trainers that enables journalists in the region to produce in-depth analytical and investigative journalism on complex political, economic and social themes. BIRN emerged from the Balkan programme of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, IWPR, in 2005. The original IWPR Balkans team was mandated to localise that programme and make it sustainable, in light of changing realities in the region and the maturity of the IWPR intervention. Since then, its work in publishing, media training and public debate activities has become synonymous with quality, reliability and impartiality. A fully-independent and local network, it is now developing as an efficient and self-sustainable regional institution to enhance the capacity for journalism that pushes for public debate on European-oriented political and economic reform.

4 thoughts on “Montenegro PM Djukanovic Named ‘Criminal Of The Year’ In Poll

  • January 5, 2016 at 12:43 pm
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    Please stop disseminating a false information about Azerbaijan

    Reply
  • January 5, 2016 at 12:43 pm
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    I think it is not ethical to write an obvious lies about Azerbaijan and its leader’s family. I don’t understand, why you are forced to do this?

    Reply
  • January 5, 2016 at 12:49 pm
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    From the journalist professionalism point of view, what you are writing about Azerbaijan is not really objective and does not reflect the reality

    Reply
  • January 5, 2016 at 3:39 pm
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    You article is extremely biased, aggressive and against Azerbaijan. What is the reason?

    Reply

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