Brnabic, Mali (Beta/Serbian Government/Slobodan Miljevic)
Serbian Finance Minister Sinisa Mali will stay in the cabinet, Prime Minister Ana Brnabic told N1 TV on Nov. 24, adding that for her the decision of the University of Belgrade Professional Ethics Committee on the minister's doctoral dissertation was political.
Explaining her opinion, Brnabic said that the decision made by the Faculty of Organizational Sciences had been amended four times, and an opinion of a regional expert commission twice.
Mali had submitted a 3,000-page appeal to the previous decision by the Faculty of Organizational Sciences, says Brnabic, and adds that the Professional Ethics Committee could by Nov. 21 only have requested more time to decide due to the volume of the appeal, which it could not review in a short time, but nevertheless made a decision under political pressure.
University Rector Ivanka Popovic said earlier that Sinisa Mali had violated the University code of ethics because he had used other authors' texts in his dissertation without citing them.
The finance minister's doctoral dissertation was called into question five years ago, when university professors accused him of plagiarizing a portion of his thesis, N1 TV recalls.
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