NGO: Outgoing Government Continues Illegal Appointment Practices

Government session (Beta /Governmnet of Serbija/Slobodan Miljevic)

From January through August of this year, the outgoing Serbian government, headed by Ana Brnabic, made 1,258 official decisions appointing interim managers in the state administration. According to Transparency Serbia’s program director, Nemanja Nenadic, more than three quarters of these appointments were not legal.

In an op-ed for the NIN weekly, Nenadic maintained that said decisions pertain to 290 individuals, most of which have been mentioned in two or more instances. Each decision gives the interim manager a three-month mandate – which, the law says, cannot be renewed.

“Seven interim managers have been illegally holding their office during the outgoing government’s entire two-year mandate, because the government extended their appointments eight times each,” Nenadic writes. 

The NGO official went on to claim that over 30 percent of the decisions in question contained “an even more grievous violation of the law” – namely retroactivity – while a fourth of all the decisions were “doubly illegal,” being retroactively passed to renew a mandate. 

Nenadic further stated that in only three cases was there a valid reason for such measures i.e. the interim management was introduced due to extended leave.