MANS, an investigative reporting network, filed the papers today as OCCRP published a collaborative project by journalists Miranda Patrucic (OCCRP) and Dejan Marovic (MANS) into Svetozar Marovic’s family assets, including a Swiss bank account held by his wife Djordjina.
The account at one time held US$ 3.8 million, and Marovic had authority to access it – so, by law, he should have declared the asset.
During the investigation by MANS and OCCRP's investigation, reporters found that he had not.
Marovic served as president of Serbia and Montenegro between 2003 and 2006, and is now the vice president of Montenegro's ruling Democratic Party of Socialists.
"Bearing in mind that Svetozar Marovic for years occupied high public functions, we requested that the Supreme Public Prosecutor urgently initiatiate an investigation and determine the origin of the money," said a statement issued by MANS.
A defiant Marovic spoke to media in Montenegro today to deny the allegations.
“All that they [can] find in any bank, from any member of my family, I will gift to all to my enemies to finance their activities against me and my friends,” he said.
Marovic promised to take legal action, referring to OCCRP and MANS’s cross-border reporting collaboration as “an alliance of erupting evil”.
Marovic’s account was one of 100,000 detailed in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)’s Swiss Leaks project, published in collaboration with French newspaper Le Monde in February 2015.
