LIDIJA MITROVIĆ: New evidence for a new criminal proceeding

Former Special Prosecutor Lidija Mitrović, who was sentenced to seven months in prison for abuse of office in a final and binding judgment, submitted a motion for a retrial to the High Court in Podgorica on 19 June.

By a decision of the Court of Appeal issued in May last year, the verdict rendered by High Court Judge Nenad Vujanović in December 2024 became final. According to the court, the abuse of office consisted of Mitrović’s decisions to dismiss criminal complaints relating to tax evasion and to postpone criminal prosecution against four suspects, authorized representatives of private companies: Nikola Perović, Izehudin Bulić, Saša Burzan and Predrag Raičković.

Although Prosecutor Mitrović concluded that the suspects had prevented damage to the state budget by paying the relevant funds into the treasury, Judge Vujanović ruled that her decision to defer prosecution had provided the four suspects with what he described as an „unlawful benefit“.

As is well known, Prosecutor Mitrović fled shortly before she was due to begin serving her prison sentence.

GROUNDS FOR A RETRIAL

In the motion submitted to the High Court in Podgorica, reviewed by Television E, Mitrović invokes the Criminal Procedure Code, arguing that numerous new facts and pieces of evidence exist that were not considered during the original proceedings.

- Article 424, paragraph 1, items 3 and 5 of the Criminal Procedure Code provide that criminal proceedings concluded by a final judgment may be reopened in favour of the convicted person if new facts are presented or new evidence is submitted which, either independently or in conjunction with previously examined evidence, could lead to the acquittal of the convicted person or to sentencing under a more lenient criminal law - Mitrović states.

She further argues that the request is based on decisive new facts that only became known to her after the final judgment had been rendered.

Reviewing the reports prepared by Ljiljana Dakić and the findings of expert Nemanja Nikolić, the former prosecutor first notes that Dakić herself testified that, in her words, „her handwritten notes were not an economic document but merely guidance for the prosecutor’s work“.

Nevertheless, the court admitted those notes as evidence.

According to Mitrović, the situation was even more problematic with the findings of expert Nikolić, which Special Prosecutor Miloš Šoškić allegedly used to introduce what she describes as fabricated evidence into the proceedings.

- An examination of the documentation submitted to the court by the prosecution, together with the complete documentation of the legal entities that served as the basis for the expert assessment, shows that expert Nikolić included inaccurate information in Report Ktrs No. 99/23 of 11 April 2023 and Report Ktrs No. 139/23 of 10 May 2023, so that Prosecutor Šoškić could subsequently incorporate those data into the indictment proposal, which would ultimately be used to secure the conviction of the defendant - the motion signed by Lidija Mitrović states.

MANIPULATION OF INVOICES

The motion further alleges that expert Nikolić improperly included invoices issued in June in the July monthly report, solely in order to exceed the statutory threshold of €10,000 necessary for consideration of tax evasion charges.

One of the key new pieces of evidence presented by Mitrović is the report prepared by expert Hamid Šabović, who allegedly identified these deficiencies in the analyses previously relied upon by the prosecution.

According to Šabović’s findings, analyst Ljiljana Dakić and expert Nemanja Nikolić calculated corporate profit tax liabilities in a fundamentally incorrect manner and acted contrary to the Law on Corporate Profit Tax by relying on profit tax declarations in an improper way. Mitrović argues that these findings establish entirely new circumstances and provide new evidence demonstrating that the abuse-of-office charges against her were fabricated.

FALSIFICATION OF DATA

- The judgment against the convicted person was based on the assertion that, by postponing criminal prosecution, she enabled suspects to avoid prosecution for the offence of tax evasion under Article 264 of the Criminal Code of Montenegro. However, the new facts demonstrate that the statutory threshold of €10,000 was never reached. This new fact affects not only the legal classification of the offence based on the amount of allegedly evaded tax, but also the factual basis concerning intent, unlawfulness, and the alleged benefit - Mitrović states.

In her submission to the High Court, Mitrović concludes that Judge Nenad Vujanović deliberately ignored instructions issued by the High Court when it overturned the first-instance judgment because he allegedly sought to conceal what she describes as decisive facts.

According to Mitrović, this was done with the intention of portraying her as the perpetrator of a criminal offence that she objectively did not commit.

CONSPIRACY

In April this year, Lidija Mitrović filed a criminal complaint against Chief Special Prosecutor Vladimir Novović, Special Prosecutor Miloš Šoškić, and court expert Nemanja Nikolić.

At the same time, Mitrović mailed a criminal complaint against High Court Judge Nenad Vujanović and Court of Appeal judges Vesna Moštrokol, Predrag Tabaš and Zorica Milanović, claiming that they convicted her on the basis of disputed financial documents, inconsistent figures, and expert findings that contradicted one another.

In the complaint submitted to the Supreme State Prosecutor’s Office headed by Milorad Marković, which was previously provided to Television E, Mitrović alleges that she was convicted on the basis of inaccurate information, arbitrary calculations, and a staged judicial process.

For that reason, in the motion she submitted to the High Court six days ago, Mitrović seeks a retrial on the grounds that new evidence and facts have emerged which, she claims, confirm that both the indictment and her conviction were fabricated.