Transparency Serbia official says law doesn’t protect Krusik whistleblower

Krusik munitions plant IT sector employee AO leaked documents showing that Branko Stefanovic, father of Internal Affairs Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic, was involved in the sale of mortar rounds which were exported to Saudi Arabia and ended up in the hands of Islamic extremists in Yemen.  

Transparency Serbia Program Director Nemanja Nenadic said that the man who revealed that a cabinet minister’s father was involved in the arms trade can’t seek protection because there is no legal basis to free him of responsibility for whistleblowing which is in the public interest. “Specifically, in terms of handling secret data, article 20 of the law (on protecting whistleblowers) allows the possibility of the whistleblower contacting prosecutors, state auditors, ministries but no the public or journalists directly,” Nenadic told Danas daily.  

He said the focus should be on proving that the leaked data was never supposed to have been classified as secret and added that the outcome of the proceedings against the Krusik employee depends on whether the information he leaked to journalists was classified as a business secret and whether the information should have been classified at all. “If it was information of interest for Serbia, that would fall under the law on data secrecy and not just the law on protecting business secrets,” he said.  

There would be no grounds to prosecute the whistleblower if the information was classified to hide business operations damaging to a state-owned company.