Montenegro Party Used Serbian Online Help in Election, NGO Says

The head of the prominent Montenegrin watchdog MANS, Vanja Calovic Markovic, on Wednesday alleged one of the parties in the now ruling For the Future of Montenegro coalition used administrators from Serbia in the campaign on social networks for last year's election .

At the promotion of MANS' report on the election, at which the Democratic Party of Socialists, DPS, was ousted, Calovic Markovic said that all the competing electoral lists spent a total of about 245,000 euros on advertising on social networks, almost ten times more than in the 2016 parliamentary elections.

"Certain electoral lists and other unknown actors from abroad paid for ads on Facebook, but the extent of these phenomena cannot be determined without access to the data of that company," she explained.

"During the election campaign, the Bad Actors Facebook page paid for advertisements that promoted For the Future of Montenegro coalition or criticized the [then ruling] DPS, although it was not registered for political advertising", Calovic Markovic said.

"That Facebook page was not officially linked with For the Future of Montenegro, but it had four administrators and they were all from Serbia," she noted.

Calovic Markovic pointed that in the official reports of some electoral lists, it was impossible to determine which costs related to their internet campaigning because they listed many reported expenditures in that category as other costs.

She also said one of the parties in the now ruling For the Future of Montenegro coalition had used a murky, Cyrpus-based offshore company to make campaign videos.

"They hired an offshore company, Limanaki Studios LTD, from Cyprus, to produce videos. That company has not submitted financial reports since its...