The Conference "Coruption in Serbia Five Years Later" took place at the Sava Centar, Belgrade, on November 3rd, 2007, gathered over sixty leading Serbian acacemics in the field, ministers of economy, finance, justice and interior affairs. CLDS presented its latest study of corruption in Serbia. (browse the Gallelry)

The Deputy Prime Minister Bozidar Djelic said that the progress in fight against corruption that was made since 2000 is not satisfactory since Serbia is lagging behind other European countries, on this issue. He also said that no one can be happy about the speed of changes, but that the introduction of anticorruption institutional innovations (such as ombudsman, public information office) has to be continued and that new institutions have to be created, such as Anticorruption Agency.

Minister of Justice Dusan Petrovic stated that corruption has to be one of the issues in Serbian transition since the progress in the fight against corruption shall determine the progress of Serbia as a country. According to the research conducted by the ministry, between 70 and 75 of the citizens think that there is corruption in the judiciary. Petrovic also said that a lot of criminal cases have been outdated, that mild punishment is common and below legal minimum and added that citizens think that corruption is the reason for poor work of courts.

The minister of interior Dragan Jocic stated that corruption is pathological phenomenon and universal social problem which is difficult to detect since it is made difficult by technocracy, bureaucracy and politics. Jocic emphasized that causes of corruption are transition, inefficiency of courts and police, inefficiency of other control bodies, incompetent implementation of laws and resistance to changes.

The minister of economy and regional development Mladjan Dinkic emphasized that corruption is a complicated problem which has to be separated and that at once has to be dealt with both its causes and consequences. Dinkic said that complicated bureaucratic procedures help corruption and that the first step in this fight would have to be their simplification and announced that the introduction of the “guillotine of procedures” shall be initiated until the end of this year.
The minister of finance Mirko Cvetkovic said that his ministry is fighting the corruption through the implementation of the existing laws, such as public procurement law, budgetary system, tax administration and financing of political parties. Cvetkovic emphasized that the operations of Tax Administration and Customs Administration has to be improved.

Boris Begovic, President of the CLDS presented the findings of the study. He emphasized that CLDS’s research demonstrates that corruption has been reduced significantly since 2001, but that the level is still above citizen expectations. The survey demonstrated that citizens perceive corruption as social, not as a personal problem, which shows that most of their answers in the survey are not based on personal experiences. The efforts of the government in the previous period have been graded at 2.3 (on a 1 to 5 scale). The research also demonstrated that the amount paid for corruption has been reduced – in 2001, 15 per cent of the entrepreneurs spent more than 10% of the total revenues on corruptio, while in 2006 only 5 per cent of entrepreneurs reported the same.