Disgraced Serbian University Chief Mounts Fightback

Jovanovic said on Sunday that the scandal that initially erupted after Serbia’s Interior Minister was accused of plagiarizing parts of his PhD thesis, then escalated to force the rector to resign, was "fabricated in order to bring down the state leadership".

The former rector of Megatrend University was caught up in the scandal when the London School of Economics (LSE) denied his claim that he had obtained his own PhD at the prestigious British college.

But during an interview with Serbia’s Pink TV on Sunday, Jovanovic showed off a document which he insisted was his PhD thesis.

He said that he had travelled to Britain to obtain the document, which he said was taken from the archives of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Jovanovic, who previously claimed that he got his PhD in 1983, also showed a document from 1991, confirming that he had defended his doctoral dissertation in January 1989.

The former rector resigned from Megatrend University on Friday after Serbia’s Education Minister called on him to quit as the scandal showed no sign of abating.

The university accepted his resignation but Jovanovic said on Sunday that he remains a professor and the owner of the private university but was “close to a decision to sell it”.

The Megatrend scandal began when three British-based Serbian academics published an article on the Pescanik.net website claiming that Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic plagiarized parts of his thesis on strategic management in local government.

Academics Ugljesa Grusic, Branislav Radeljic and Slobodan Tomic told Balkan Insight that they read the thesis in detail and stood behind the claims in their article.

Afterwards, some professors...