Last year the Anti-Corruption Council determined that Zvezdara Municipality issued a building permit to a Housing Cooperative erased from the Register of the Court, later, however, allowed to move to Senta by the decision of the Court of Commerce, and return registered as a company.

The Council forwarded its findings both to the former and present Government. None of them reacted, although everyone, from the Prime Minister to the President of Zvezdara Municipality were aware that repurchased flats were no longer social but private property, although everyone knew that it was impossible to issue permits pursuant to the law from 1984 (annulled in 1994) in 2004, although it was more than clear that new lofts were erected for the purpose of market sale, and not for the benefit of the cooperative members. Nevertheless, almost every Belgrade municipality has a problem with the usurpation of the roofs. The petitions made to the Anti-Corruption Council indicate that everything starts from the municipality, involving very often city authorities and its institutions, and courts as well. The flat owners in Konjarnik went trough hell since 2003, when the police tried to ‘let the investor in the property’.

Even today the owners live in fear and on guard, some of them brutally beaten, for the gorillas protecting the investor didn’t pay attention to the age. In 113 Brace Jerkovic in Vozdovac, an investor took over the roof by fraud, built two flours instead of one flour and a loft, and built an elevator only 5 centimeters away from the bedroom. The old building is sinking , the walls are cracking, but the investor does not mind. The Municipality issued a decision banning the construction, but someone wrote a wrong address and the paper was misdirected. The Lawyer’s office of Mr. Aleksandar Prodanovic, Vice President of the Municipality, even represented the investor against the flat owners. On the day of the trial, the judge of The Fifth Municipal Court instructed his colleague to advise the flat owners that the trial is to be adjourned for two months.

In Profesorska kolonija, in the loft of the private house of the Dimic family, which was always a private property, Palilula Municipality organized a classical trespass into the private property, throwing the pictures of the academic painter Mr. Dimic to initiate the erection of the two flats in the loft. The construction started without the consent of the legal owners of the house. The house is, moreover, under the protection of the state and its appearance must not be changed, but the investor, it seams, has a better protection. The Supreme Court ruled two different rulings for the two pretendant on the flats in the same loft: in favor of the one, while the ruling in the case of the second one was negative.

We are already accustomed that everything is possible between the two election rounds in Serbia, it is even possible that the politicians ‘repent’. Will physical persons finally get the chance to enjoy their rightful right to a private property, now that the power has been conquered? Will Mr. Bogdanovic, after wining the elections, keep thinking that the owners of the flats in Konjarnik are right?

Ms Verica Barac,
President of the Council