state officials with suspicious assets

Verification of the origin of the declared property of top state officials in Kosovo continues to remain an impossible mission, due to the lack of legal mechanisms, civil society representatives claim.

The inability to verify origin, they say, raises doubts about how real and legal the declared wealth is.

State officials are obliged each year to declare their property in the Kosovo Anti-Corruption Agency, which has already completed about 98 percent of them, the agency's leaders show. In the property statement register at this agency, some of the state officials have declared great value of active, real estate, as well as cash available in financial institutions, which in certain cases amounts to millions of euros.

The director of this agency, Shaip Havolly, in a conversation about “the Radio Free Europe”, has said that state officials' property statements are not always accurate. But, the agency, Havol said, there are no mechanisms for tracking the origin of their property. He has indicated that to verify the background that property is already preparing a new law to verify state officials' declared property.

The Kosovo Assembly in 2011 has adopted the Law on Declaration, Origin and Control of the property of senior public officials, on which the property declaration process ends.

The “is meant for new law, but normal some elements of the current law will be taken, because it is in accounting to improve the legal basis. By the new law, there are rules, standards, how the origin of wealth will be verified. This is already a draft law and we hope that this bill will go to government in this year”, Havolli said.

State officials declare and assess, according to “wishfulness” the value of wealth that is both lyrical, real estate and the sum of cash available at the Anti-Corruption Agency, civil society representatives say, under which the procedure creates room for suspicion of their property's legality.

Arton Demhay, director of the Organisation for Democracy, Anti-Corruption and Dignitia ; Stand up, says the establishment of the legal base on this issue requires urgent commitment, because some of the state officials have declared assets of a million value that are incompatible with their annual revenues. And here comes the impression that they have illegal or illegally acquired wealth. So I think there's a lot of room to review the legal basis in this regard. The mechanisms and legal provisions taken to verify the origin of property that top public officials” must be created, Demhasey said. Demhayan has stressed that under the new law, the seizure of property should be allowed if it proves that the assets of officials are illegal. In Kosovo, there is the Law for extensive competencies for confiscating property acquired by criminal acts.

But, according to this law, the seizure of property only applies to persons convicted of any criminal acts with the Kosovo Criminal Code. For this, Demhayan has confirmed that competent authorities have never taken the matter of civil law seriously, Kosovo has always filed with the penal model of seizure of assets, and for this matter has consistently been shown and failed.

While in the Ministry of Justice, they have said that “within the framework of this ministry's legislative programme for 2020 is also the draft Law on Declaration, Origin and Property Control, which is being dealt with jointly with the Bill for the Anti-Corruption Agency”.

“The Ministry of Justice, the versions drafted by the working group part of which are representatives from the Anti-Corruption Agency, then representatives from the judicial and prosecutorial system, strategic partners, as well as civil society, will proceed during September for consultations, first for preliminary and later with the public, to ensure that the process of drafting and finalising these bills is as comprehensive and transparent <x1, it is said in response to the Ministry of Justice.

Representatives of nongovernmental organisations have repeatedly demanded that competent organs be taken more seriously with the verification and seizure of property than illegal, since according to them, most of the property illegally acquired in Kosovo is in the hands of powerful people and, therefore, is stressed that the will for these persons to be prosecuted has been lacking and, as a result, has not been possible for their wealth to be confiscated.