Scandal-Hit Serbian Rector Sued for Hacking

Miljana Radivojevic, a research associate at University College London who was involved in publicising the PhD claims, said on Friday that she is suing former rector Mica Jovanovic and another, unknown person who she accuses of hacking emails that she wrote about the subject.

"Due to unauthorized access to her private emails and a violation of confidentiality of correspondence, Miljana Radivojevic, a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute for Archaeology at the University College London, has pressed criminal charges against an unknown person and Mica Jovanovic, a former rector of Megatrend University," Radivojevic said in a statement.

The allegations came three weeks after Jovanovic, during interviews with two Serbian television shows, showed printouts of hacked email exchanges between Radivojevic and Dejan Popovic, a professor from the Belgrade Law Faculty and former rector of the University of Belgrade, accusing them of initiating the scandal that hit Megatrend University last month.

The scandal began when three British-based Serbian academics published an article claiming that Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic plagiarized parts of the PhD thesis he did at Megatrend, which then brought Stefanovic’s mentor, Jovanovic, into the spotlight.

Radivojevic, together with her colleague Marko Milanovic, subsequently published an article claiming that Jovanovic did not obtain his PhD in London, as he said in his official biography.

Jovanovic has accused hacker group Anonymous Serbia of breaking into Radivojevic’s emails and sending them to various media outlets in Serbia, but the hackers denied the allegations.