High Court in Podgorica: No grounds for retrial of Lidija Mitrović
The High Court in Podgorica has rejected Lidija Mitrović's request for the reopening of criminal proceedings that were concluded by a final judgment of the same court.
Mitrović was sentenced to seven months in prison after being found guilty of the continued criminal offence of abuse of official position.
- That judgment was upheld by the Court of Appeals of Montenegro - the High Court said in a statement.
The Court recalled that on June 23, 2026, Mitrović filed a request for the reopening of the proceedings concluded by the final judgment of the High Court in Podgorica, relying primarily on Article 424, Paragraph 1, Items 3 and 5 of the Criminal Procedure Code. In her request, she argued that an analysis prepared on December 24, 2023, by H.Š., a former court-certified expert in economics and finance whom she had privately engaged, constituted new evidence. The analysis was attached to her request.
- She also stated that she had previously submitted the report together with her appeal to the Court of Appeals in support of her arguments, but that the report had not been admitted as evidence during the proceedings or discussed at trial, and therefore should be regarded as new evidence - the statement said.
However, the High Court found that the expert report and opinion did not constitute either a new fact or new evidence within the meaning of Article 424, Paragraph 1, Item 3 of the Criminal Procedure Code.
- In the panel's assessment, the mere fact that the analysis and expert opinion prepared by H.Š. were not admitted as evidence during the main hearing does not, in itself, give them the status of new evidence under Article 424, Paragraph 1, Item 3 of the Criminal Procedure Code. The decisive factor is not simply whether certain evidentiary material was formally admitted during the proceedings, but whether it was unknown to the court and the parties at the time the decision was made, or whether it represents a new circumstance that could not have been considered in the ordinary proceedings. In this case, the analysis was known to the convicted person, was submitted together with her appeal, and was substantively examined by the Court of Appeal of Montenegro. The fact that it was not assigned the evidentiary weight the convicted person expected during the ordinary proceedings cannot transform it into new evidence within the meaning of Article 424, Paragraph 1, Item 3 of the Criminal Procedure Code. Any contrary interpretation would mean that any expert report or opinion obtained and presented by a party during the ordinary proceedings, but rejected by the court or not given decisive weight, could later serve as grounds for reopening a final criminal case - the Court explained.
According to the Court, such an interpretation would deprive the reopening procedure of its character as an extraordinary legal remedy and instead turn it into a mechanism for re-examining the assessment of evidence already considered by the courts.
- The panel further found that the analysis and expert opinion prepared by H.Š. did not establish any new facts previously unknown to the courts but merely offered a different expert interpretation of the same documentation and evidence that had already been examined during the original proceedings. The mere fact that a particular expert opinion reaches conclusions more favourable to the convicted person does not automatically constitute grounds for reopening the proceedings, since this extraordinary legal remedy cannot be used to seek a reassessment of the correctness or persuasiveness of the evidence on which the final judgment was based - the statement said.
In the reasoning of its decision, the panel also noted that the analysis in question had not been prepared as an expert report commissioned in accordance with Article 137 of the Criminal Procedure Code, under which expert examinations are ordered by a written decision of the authority conducting the proceedings in order to provide specialised knowledge necessary for establishing, assessing, or clarifying legally relevant facts.
- The report was prepared at the request of the convicted person, who privately engaged the expert. It therefore constitutes a privately obtained expert opinion, which does not alter the fact that it is based on the same documentation and data that were already the subject of evidentiary proceedings and judicial assessment. The panel also noted that the arguments contained in the request challenging the courts' conclusions regarding tax calculations, the methodology of the expert examination, and the evidentiary value of certain evidence essentially repeat the defence already considered during the ordinary proceedings, rather than presenting new facts or new evidence capable of leading to a different outcome - the Court said.
The panel concluded that this statutory requirement for reopening the proceedings had likewise not been met.
- This is because, in the present case, the convicted person did not present any new facts or submit any new evidence indicating that she had not committed any of the acts comprising the continued criminal offence for which she was finally convicted. The arguments raised in the request do not concern the existence or non-existence of the specific acts attributed to the convicted person, but rather challenge the methodology used to calculate the tax liabilities of the legal entities involved in the proceedings and offer a different interpretation of evidence that had already been examined - the statement concluded.