12. 05. 2002

CRIMINAL CHARGES OVER AN ARTICLE ON HIGHWAYS

BELGRADE, May 12, 2002- The Serbian Road Directorate has announced it is to file criminal charges against those within weekly "Blic News" who were responsible for an article on the construction and restoration of highways and tenders of the Serbian Road Administration. The Directorate said that "everything written" in the mentioned article was absolutely untrue. Among other things, the article, "Surcin Boys Build Roads through Serbia," says that the Republican Road Directorate has been given the job of building the Belgrade-Nis highway, instead of inviting tenders. According to the daily, the directorate then gave this job to the Belgrade Roads Company which does not even have an asphalt machine, but has leased one from the Surcin company Krmivo-Produkt, that specializes in the production of fodder and eggs. The weekly also writes that the owner of "Krmivo-Produkt" is Dragoljub Markovic, a close friend of and best man to Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, and allegedly one the main financiers of Djindjic's Democratic Party (DS). Meanwhile, the author of the article has withdrawn the allegation. The magazine's editor-in-chief, Zeljko Cvijanovic, told Radio B92 that the Road Directorate had put pressure on the journalist. "The Road Directorate did not deny any of the claims set out in the article, but it, in a way, brought in our journalist and requested that he renounce the article", said Cvijanovic. "The journalist was there [at the Directorate] and said that he was compelled to renounce authorship over part of the article, i.e. to say that the article was actually not his. I even heard that they persuaded him to bring the article he handed over to the editor-in-chief so that they would be able to compare who wrote what. I think this is disastrous", Cvijanovic stated. The director of the Road Directorate, Tihomir Timotijevic, denied the claims for B92. "All we did was to ask to contact the journalists who wrote the mentioned article so as to provide them with the complete documentation on the issue they wrote about, because we believe that such an article has tarnished the reputation, not only of the Republican Directorate, but also of the government and the state itself", said Timotijevic. Timotijevic said he would also file charges against Cvijanovic.