Vucic Disputes BIRN Revelations on Etihad Contract

A week after BIRN published the draft agreements between the Serbian government and UAE’s Etihad airway, Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic on Thursday made public some of the contracts at a press conference, blaming journalists for not having the right version and questioning their intentions.

The Prime Minister refuted some parts of the draft contracts published by BIRN and insisted that those were not included in the final contract.

“They must have received some previous drafts,” he said. Vucic said he had read the disclaimer in the BIRN article, which is that it is part of an EU-funded project, but commented: “I really do not want to believe that people from the EU could be involved in this.”

The Prime Minister said that Vreme weekly, which published BIRN’s investigation, belonged to tycoon Miroslav Miskovic who is awaiting trial for corruption and has become a symbol of Vucic’s anti-corruption policy.

Slobodan Georgijev, BIRN journalist and author of the investigation published on August 7, said: “In the article itself we have repeatedly said it was a draft of the agreement. All the information in the story was supported with documents.”

"Since we obtained the draft documents of the five agreements, five months ago, we have repeatedly tried to get response from the office of the then deputy PM and now Prime Minister Vucic, for which we have a paper trail. The Mayor of Belgrade, Sinisa Mali, who initially agreed to discuss the contracts, also declined to respond,” Georgijev added.

The Association of Independent Journalists, NUNS, reacted on Friday, saying that “in a democratic society it is unacceptable for the PM to discredit media in such a manner in public”.

The NUNS press...