The Minister of Culture and Information, Vladan Vukosavljevic, brutally and extremely primitively insulted Kurir, calling the entire editorial board of our newspaper a “tabloid mafia”, and only because we dared to ask him where the citizens’ money was spent and if it was necessary to be in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic. And before the end of the term, he allocated up to 37 million dinars to a private company to organize events!
Where is the money
Instead of the Minister explaining to the public whether his ministry had to allocate tens of millions of dinars from the state treasury for the organization of rallies, conferences, at the time it is called not to organize meetings of a large number of citizens due to the Kovid 19 pandemic, and just before the end of the term. and seminars, Vukosavljević primitively attacked Kurir, insulting our editorial office and the entire editorial office the worst.
Forgetting that, as Minister of Information, you should at least support the freedom of the media to inform the public about how state money is spent by personal example, Vukosavljevic even threatened our editorial office with the most primitive vocabulary, calling us , among other things, “a notorious tabloid known for falsehood and banality.” “(?!).
– Kurir’s editorial board has decided to sink to the bottom in the mud of falsehoods and deliberately mislead and annoy the public with the title and text and commit such a media crime, either by someone’s criminal order or by his perverted understanding of morality – is just one of the shameful statements Minister of Culture.
The minister did not stop there either, but continued with insults at the expense of our editorial staff, for which he added that we are a “media outlaw” that we must stop! Does that mean that the Minister of Information wants to silence a medium that dares to write what he personally does not like?
The Information Minister does not say in a single word that Kurir transmitted in a completely professional manner all the details of the publicly available contract for which they awarded 37 million dinars to the company “Miross doo” through the public procurement procedure, nor that they We send the questions correctly: if it was necessary for the Minister in the current situation and before the end of his term to assign these budgetary funds to someone, and that we transmit the response of the Ministry in its entirety.
photo: Private Archive
Instead, Vukosavljevic continues to justify incoherently and claim that the money was not spent, but was only “set aside” for stated needs. However, he did not explain in a single word where and why so much money was “reserved” for the citizens of Serbia. And that is the question of public interest that Kurir insists and will always insist on, despite the obvious nervousness of the minister, who, it seems, is very fed up with the truth!
Distortion of the truth
Vukosavljevic, and not Kurir, misled the public in his embarrassing statement, claiming that the disputed public procurement was announced by the ministry’s expert commission. In fact, and this can be easily verified by inspecting the publicly available documentation, the Minister, as it is said, made the decision to award the contract personally, and in the end personally signed the document!
Vukosavljevic also abused the Ministry of Culture, which he heads: he threatened the Post that the department would bring criminal charges against us, obviously again at the expense of the citizens of Serbia, rather than personally.
All of this was, to say the least, moot for the experts Kurir spoke with, which is why lawyer Ivan Ninić estimated that it is most likely a question of extracting money from the state budget precisely because Vukosavljević knows he will not be able to do so soon .
– That acquisition is in itself inappropriate under the conditions of the pandemic, which were largely in force. It is a classic modus operandi to empty the state treasury before the end of the term and leave the presidency of the state, Ninić told our newspaper.
Dragan Dobrašinović, president of the Coalition for the Supervision of Public Finance, evaluated for Kurir that it could be debatable whether the content of the requested service had to be such, because he believes that part of the requested services could certainly be assumed by the ministry itself.
VLADAN VUKOSAVLJEVIC’S BIGGEST SCANDALS
He made a scandalous decision to fund the reprint of the book by the greatest forger in Serbian history, the pseudo-historian Miloš S. Milojević, with almost a million dinars, who claimed that today’s Montenegro is “Red Croatia”. The scandal was pointed out by more than 140 scientists, who signed an appeal in which they recalled the reasons why Milojevic was discredited during his lifetime.
In 2018, he found himself in the middle of a movie scandal twice in a month. After it was revealed that the Ministry of Culture provided part of the money for the filming of the anti-Serbian film “Cargo”, the storm was caused by the possibility that his department did not provide a dinar for Lordan Zafranovic’s film “Children of Kozara “, which talks about the suffering of Serbian children during World War II. in the Ustasha camps.
He never responded to the public how the work “Bird Trap” by the painter Milo Milunović, lost in the 1990s, appeared in the exhibition organized by him and curator Nikola Kusovac.
In 2018, a scandal erupted when sculptures of Miki and Paja in a sexual position were placed in the Serbian Cultural Center in Paris, over which the Ministry of Culture, headed by Vukosavljević at the time, has jurisdiction.
Under the leadership of Minister Vukosavljević, this year’s purchase of books by the Ministry of Culture for public libraries in the territory of Serbia censored three titles: 1) Ivo Goldštajn, “Jasenovac”; 2) Vladimir Petrović, “Ethnic cleansing”; 3) Dejan Ristic, “Myths of the history of Serbia”, which was evaluated by numerous experts as a scandal.
Vladimir Radomirovic, UNS
THIS IS NOT NORMAL BEHAVIOR
photo: Media Centar
The president of the Association of Serbian Journalists, Vladimir Radomirović, was extremely surprised by the behavior of the Minister of Information, Vladimir Vukosavljević.
– I am surprised by the announcement of the Minister of Culture and Information. First of all, it is not in line with democratic standards for the Ministry of Culture to file criminal charges against any media, and it is not in line with the basic principles of normal behavior that a minister charged with creating as free access to the media Possible call an editorial office a mafia organization. Even if Kurir made a mistake in his text, they had the opportunity to respond to that and not threaten Kurir in this way, Radomirović emphasized in our article.
