There is no money laundering in transactions of Mali – insufficient information from the prosecutor's office

According to the evaluation of The Higher Public Prosecutor's Office, what we have rated as a kind of “a demonstration exercise of money laundering” does not constitute a criminal offence. This inference may be drawn from the statements HPP given in response to the journalist “Whistles”. “From the collected and analysed data, The Higher Public Prosecution in Belgrade has found that there is no evidence to suggest that the actions of the mayor Sinisa Mali acquire elements of any crime within the jurisdiction of a higher prosecution '.

Senior public prosecutors are competent for the crime of money laundering in violation of Article 245 of the Criminal Code. The exceptions are situations where there is the Prosecutor's Office for Organized Crime. These are the cases where the property subject to money laundering originates from carrying out criminal act of organized criminal group and individual corruption offences involving senior officials. However, it is clear that HPP in Belgrade did not consider that the proceedings should be conducted before the Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime, because it shows that the writings are referred to The Basic PP in Belgrade, in order to examine the possible responsibility for the crimes that are within their competence (declaration of property or giving false data on property).

And otherwise, it is unlikely that the money laundering case, described in previously published articles “KRIK”s could be the responsibility of POC. Specifically, Sinisa Mali, at the time of suspicious transactions, did not have the status of the public official.

The offence under Article 245 of the Penal Code can be done in several ways. According to  the first  paragraph, a person who performs the conversion or transfer of a property, “with the knowledge that such property is derived from criminal activity, in order to conceal or disguise the illegal origin of property” as the one who “conceals or disguises the facts on property with the knowledge that such property is derived from criminal activity, or acquires, keeps or uses property knowing, at the time of receipt, that such property was derived from criminal activity”, may be prosecuted. The second paragraph envisages higher penalty in the case of higher values of assets (over 1.5 million dinars), the third paragraph provides for greater punishment if it is a property that  the defendant himself acquired by criminal activity, the fourth paragraph stands for the responsibility for the group members. The fifth paragraph sets forth the responsibility and less punishment for those who didn’t have the intention of  laundering money, but they had a “conscious negligence”, they could know and were required to know that the money or property is the revenue of criminal activity.

Given that the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office, as well as in many other cases, hasn’t published any data on the basis of which it could be concluded that the verification is performed and how this conclusion came to be that there is not any criminal responsibility, it is not possible to assess whether this decision is lawful. In other words, it is not known whether the prosecution examination concluded that the transferred money has had a legal origin. We recall that what caused suspicion among The Anti-corruption Agency when it comes to the money laundering, is the fact that the company owned by Sinisa Mali, was sold for more than half a million dollars (“Ferdi Genetics”), a company “with one employee and insignificant financial indicators” and that, to pay the firm “Alessio investment Ltd, it has used a Swiss bank account, UBS AG” Otherwise, UBS bank was a  major player in the affair with tax evasion and hiding the account of US citizens, which is why the US state had to pay a fine of 780 million dollars.

Finally, we draw attention to the fact that the proposal of a new Law on prevention of money are in to the Parliament. Transparency Serbia will soon formulate its proposals for amendments to this law (especially in relation to the definition of “officials” as well as persons who that undergo special audits), which will supply all the parliamentary groups, as well as the Ministry of Finance, which has not organized a public debate on the draft of this act (consultations were held with NBS and commercial banks), although it has had a legal obligation to do so. We also invite all readers to send us their suggestions and point out the provisions of this act that could be improved.