Pescanik.net

The Education Ministry’s Centre for Checking Diplomas will be given powers to verify all new state officials’ diplomas under the planned legislative changes, BIRN has learned from a ministry source.

"The idea is that the Centre prevents people with fake diplomas from working in state institutions in the future," the source said.

Anonymous Serbia told Balkan Insight that it had nothing to do with hacking the emails of Miljana Radivojevic, a professor from University College London who wrote about the revelations that Megatrend University rector Mica Jovanovic did not get his PHD at the London School of Economics, as he had claimed.

Professor Srbijanka Turajlic said the only way to resolve the row over whether the Interior Minister plagiarised his university dissertation was for the academic to "wake up and press the authorities" about it, she told BIRN.

Instead, the academic community seems intent on pushing the issue of Nebojsa Stefanovic's PhD thesis under the carpet, the retired professor added.

Srdjan Verbic, Serbian Education Minister, on Thursday called on Mica Jovanovic, rector of the privately run Megatrend University in Serbia, to resign.

The call came after the European Network of National Information Centres on Academic Recognition and Mobility determined that Jovanovic did not obtain a PhD at the London School of Economics, LSE, as his official biography claims.

Over 2,700 professors, lecturers and PhD students in Serbia have signed an online petition demanding an investigation of claims that the Interior Minister copied parts of his doctoral thesis.

Vladimir Pavicevic, of the opposition Nova Stranka (New Party), told a Friday debate in parliament that the case of Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic's plagiarism of parts of his PhD thesis "could not be more obvious".

The protest held in Belgrade's main square against the Interior Minister was organized on Facebook by group called “Citizens against Nebojsa Stefanovic." 

It has attracted more than 4,200 likes and reflects the anger felt by some over claims that Minister Stefanovic plagiarised parts of his PhD thesis on local government.

"This is the most stupid thing I have read in my life," Vucic said on Tuesday, dismissing the plagiarism claims that were published by prominent Serbian independent website Pescanik.net.

"If someone wanted to attack Stefanovic, he could have been much more intelligent," he said.

Mica Jovanovic, the rector of Megatrend University, said on Monday that the thesis was genuine and that he would sue the three authors of the article minister’s published on the prominent website Pescanik.net.

“We will sue all three, and we will form a commission that will defend the university and Nebojsa Stefanovic,” Jovanovic said.

The Pescanik.net website said on Monday that it had been brought down by a Denial of Service (DOS) attack a day earlier, directly after publishing allegations that that Serbian Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic had plagiarised parts of his PhD thesis.

Serbian Minister’s University Accused