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Calendar Updated: May 7, 2011
News > Corruption will be biggest obstacle on road to EU

Corruption will be biggest obstacle on road to EU

The issue of corruption will be the hardest hurdle to overcome on the road Serbia intends to travel toward becoming an EU member, says Vladimir Goati.

Goati, who heads Transparency Serbia, believes that this area has been "most neglected".
He, however, saw some progress in the fact that corruption was being increasingly discussed, along with its "metastases".
But, Goati warned, the co-called political corruption has not yet been addressed at all - not a single person in power or close to the ruling structures has been arrested for corruption.

He also said he did not favor descriptions of Serbia as a country suffering from systemic corruption, describing it instead as "political".

"I feel that when people say, 'systemic corruption', they mean to say, big, or important corruption. This is in fact called political corruption and next to that stands small corruption, which tends to be huge in volume. However, no corruption is systemic. (It is) according to the importance we assign to it - but I do not see that it is in the system," Goati was quoted as saying.

Transparency Serbia Program Director Nemanja Nenadić announced that the NGO will start a project to monitor implementation of Serbia's new law regulating political party funding.

Nenadić expects the law to bring improvements, but criticized some parts of the legislation as insufficiently specific, "thus leaving room for manipulation".

Source: B92