Category: Money and deals
Period: from 2013
Outcome: No one investigated (as of 14 May 2020)
According to BIRN, companies of the NITES group, one of whose directors is the husband of then justice minister Nela Kuburović and the brother of Darija Kisić Tepavčević, have signed 27 public procurement contracts worth about €26.8 million since 2013. According to Transparency Serbia, there is no data on any breach of procedure, but most of the tenders drew only one bidder; Kuburović denied any link to the company, and Kisić Tepavčević denied that her brother is a director. The Anti-Corruption Agency was not able to examine the business of spouses' companies, and the institutions that ran the tenders did not comment.
According to a BIRN investigation from May 2020, companies in the NITES group, where one of the directors is the husband of then justice minister Nela Kuburović and the brother of Darija Kisić Tepavčević, had signed 27 public procurement contracts in Serbia since 2013, worth around €26.8 million, either alone or in consortiums with other companies.
Since 2016, consortiums including NITES had won twelve contracts from the Ministry of Health, worth around €14 million, and in April 2020, during the state of emergency, NITES and Telekom Srbija signed three more with that ministry, worth €3.2 million.
Kuburović denied any link to the company and said that conflicts of interest are a matter for the Anti-Corruption Agency. Kisić Tepavčević, then deputy director of the Batut Institute of Public Health, did not answer questions about the tenders.
The Agency did not tell BIRN whether it was examining the tenders; according to Transparency Serbia, it concluded there were no grounds for proceedings against the minister, and under the law at the time it could not examine the business of spouses' companies at all. Transparency Serbia says there is no data showing the contracts were awarded in breach of procedure, but also that most of the tenders drew only one bidder, and that the institutions that ran them did not comment.
In March 2021, Marinika Tepić presented a contract under which NITES, together with another company, was awarded a job worth almost three million euros by EPS in January 2021.
Kisić Tepavčević, then labour minister, denied that her brother was a director and said he was one of the engineers, while the company's website, according to N1, listed him as chief executive officer.