Soskic on 140 PhDs, Jaksic Answers Danas
A Student List candidate tells Vreme about lustration and public debt, while Aleksandar Jaksic repeats in Danas his claim about Soskic's election as full professor.
Aleksandar Jaksic, a member of the Presidency of the Serbian Progressive Party, repeated in a reply published in Danas on October 15 that Dejan Soskic was elected full professor in 2015 on the basis of falsified data. According to Danas, the education inspectorate arrives at the Faculty of Economics in Belgrade on Friday, October 16, and the dean confirmed this to N1.
Soskic is a former governor of the National Bank of Serbia, a professor at the faculty and a candidate on the Student List. Alongside Jaksic’s reply, an interview with Soskic in the weekly Vreme, relayed by N1, has appeared. In it he talks about the expertise of the people on his list, lustration and public debt.
What does Jaksic claim, and who did he turn to?
Jaksic said on Sunday, October 11, that Soskic did not meet the requirements for election as full professor in 2015 and was chosen on the basis of falsified reports. He then announced that he would ask the Ministry of Education for an extraordinary inspection of the Faculty of Economics. In his reply to Danas he says he approached the education inspectorate with a petition, citing Article 10, paragraph 1, point 4 of the Law on Education Inspection, and that he sent “all the facts and evidence” to Rector Vladan Djokic, all members of the Senate of the University of Belgrade, and the rectors and deans of state and private universities and faculties across Serbia.
He wrote the reply to the Danas piece “Master of Damage Control,” published on October 13. He rejects the criticism that he “sued” Soskic to the inspectorate instead of going to the University:
“I did not ‘sue’ Soskic, I filed a petition with the competent institution to check the legality of his election.”
Jaksic adds that at the session of the Faculty of Economics Council held on October 1, seven days before the debate on RTS, he informed all Council members of his claim. That answers the suggestion that he acted only after Soskic’s appearance in that debate. He also says that none of the 5,000 members of the academic community to whom he sent the documentation has publicly stated, under their full name, that Soskic met the requirements. He ends with the line: “Challenging evidence obviously takes arguments, political solidarity is not enough.”
In the same piece Jaksic calls Soskic the list’s candidate for prime minister, which the Student List has not confirmed in any statements available to us. Nor does the reply to Danas say which requirements were not met, or which papers or journals are in dispute.
What do the dean and Soskic say about the accusations?
Faculty of Economics Dean Zaklina Stojanovic said that the procedure for electing Professor Soskic was carried out entirely in line with the procedures, rules and regulations of the faculty and the University of Belgrade, and that there were no objections to his election. Jaksic disputes precisely that “no objections” point in his reply: in his view, the legality of an election depends on whether the prescribed requirements were met, not on the fact that nobody examined the documentation in detail in 2015.
Soskic told Danas:
“The answers about my title should come from the competent bodies of the University.”
N1 reported earlier that Soskic would not comment on the opinions of politicians about topics on which, as he put it, they are obviously not competent.
What did Soskic say in the Vreme interview?
Soskic says the Student List has more than 140 PhD holders and that these are people of incomparably greater ability than the leading figures in government, since “no words need to be wasted on the difference in integrity and morals.” He then asked:
“So who do we see as the ‘great experts’ in that regime who supposedly know something? Mostly people with little training and bought diplomas.”
The Student List, he says, advocates passing a Law on Lustration and enforcing the Law on the Origin of Property. The judiciary and prosecution, he promises, will do their job, and candidates for public sector posts will be selected differently:
“A liberated prosecution and the entire judicial system will do their job, and independent expert commissions will choose the best candidates for decision-making posts in the public sector, through public competitions, completely transparently.”
Soskic judges that it is now much easier to identify and find qualified people, and he describes the state of the country’s institutions this way:
“This sorry collapse of our country and its state institutions over the past decade or so has one big advantage for the future winning government. People have shown who they are.”
In the economic part of the interview he says Serbia’s public debt rose from 12.5 billion euros at the start of 2012 to more than 42 billion euros today. By his estimate, Telekom’s debt is probably above five billion euros, EPS owes more than one billion, Srbijagas close to one billion, and the private sector’s cross-border loans come to about 20 billion euros. He adds that there are also unsettled obligations at the level of the City of Belgrade, other local governments and public institutions.
The inspection arrives at the Faculty of Economics on Friday, October 16. Until then, two opposing versions of the same 2015 election stand: Jaksic’s, that Soskic was elected on falsified reports, and the dean’s, that the procedure followed the rules and drew no objections.
