About fifteen Russian citizens are suspected of exchanging more than $1m on several occasions in the first half of October 2016 for the needs of the Movement for Changes (PzP), ie the Democratic Front (DF) political coalition in the election campaign, several Pobjeda’s sources close to investigation confirmed.
According to the newspaper, these allegations resulted from a large-scale investigation conducted by the Special State Prosecutor’s Office for nearly a year. Within the investigation, complaints were filed against eleven people, suspected of having participated in numerous financial embezzlements of money laundering for the benefits of PzP.
In addition to PzP Leader Nebojsa Medojevic and businessman Momir Nikolic, the list of suspects contains the names of PzP director Dejan Vujisic, technical secretary of the party and Medojevic’s brother in law, Zeljko Scepanovic, and local foreign currency dealer Gordan Konatar. The investigation also included five street foreign currency dealers – Milos Mrva Gvozdenovic, Dejan and Violeta Buskovic, Zeljko Pejovic and Radovan Scekic.
After several months of investigation, dozens of witnesses have been questioned and numerous pieces of evidence have been collected, pointing to the involvement of Russian citizens in illegal jobs ahead of parliamentary elections in October last year. Investigators have learned that the Russians laundered money for party purposes in Podgorica, but also in two cities on the Montenegrin coast.
According to these data, the Special State Prosecutor’s Office has busted the scheme of embezzlements and how roles and tasks were delegated among all the “associates”.
As a reminder, transactions of Scepanovic and Konatar came into lime light last year in October, when they were caught with money of suspicious origin. Then, police seized €30,000 from Scepanovic and €18,000 from Konatar.
It was later found that Scepanovic exchanged $100,000 in euros on at least three occasions.
Investigators have found that on several occasions Nikolic received from abroad almost €1m on his bank account. Those suspicious money transfers were mostly from the former Soviet republics, now EU members. According to the information obtained by the investigators, in a single transaction, Nikolic received €175,000 from Lithuania. They suspect those were transfers of money through Russian companies based in Lithuania.
Medojevic and Nikolic allegedly created a plan to put money gained through illegal conversion of foreign currency in the payment system, as well as the money obtained for the illegal financing of certain political parties for general elections.
“Nebojsa Medojevic was tasked with recruiting members of the criminal organization that will be engaged in unauthorised exchange the US dollars to euro and putting the money in legal flows for the needs of political entities; organising delivery of money obtained from illegal activities to other members of the organisation and citizens who will pay this money to bank accounts of political entities as donations; directing the statements of members of the criminal organization in case the plan is busted; and coming up with new forms of illegal transfers of money obtained by criminal activities into legal flows,” the Special Prosecutor’s Office’s document says.
Medojevic’s parliamentary immunity has been lifted due to these charges. However, he has not been detained based on the binding instruction the supreme state prosecutor Ivica Stankovic sent to the Special State Prosecutor’s Office.
