Presentation by the Minister of Finance dr Igor Lukšić on the working breakfast with media

The Ministry of Finance pays significant attention to the obligations derived from the Action plan for fighting corruption and organized crime, thus providing the conditions to transfer it to the preventive intervention level. As for that, I can, with great satisfaction, state that the most of the measures planned to implement during the years 2007 and 2008 are implemented or to be implemented very soon, but we had also noted several new obligations or necessary activities to be proposed to the Interventions working group for this action plan during the following period, in order to include those in that new document. At the very beginning, I would like to stress the things that had already been done, and planned new legislation recently adopted by the Parliament. One of those is the Law on Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing Prevention a brand new law fully in line with the European directives and we are practically among the countries, though not a EU member state, which is dedicated to apply those directives although that is not our obligation in this phase, but we wanted to send the signal that we desire to create safe economy system to be stimulating for foreign investments and that we are on the good path towards the definitions given by the latest European directives building the system for money laundering and terrorism financing prevention; afterwards there was a ratification of a law, i.e. legislation of the Law on Ratification of EU Civil Law Convention on Corruption, recently a new Law on Public Procurement was legislated, as well as the Law on Banks, Law on Amendments and Extensions of the Customs Law. All of those were the obligations originally stated in the Action Plan. Besides that, the Parliamentary procedure covers some significant laws in this area, such as the Law on Political Parties Financing and the Law on Financing of the Election Campaign for the President of Montenegro, Meyers and Presidents of Municipalities. Unfortunately, those laws are graded as legislation requiring two-third majority and I am personally surprised that such a majority is not established within the Parliament, to support those laws going towards the conclusions and requests of the international community, respectable in this area since they provide increase of disbursement transparency for the tax payers money to finance these activities and in that sense I believe that it would be absolutely beneficial to have been adopted end last year, since the Ministry of Finance had prepared them timely in cooperation with non-governmental organizations. Afterwards, there are two legislations to provide as clear ownership records and therefore decrease the barriers which may also be consequence of the certain level of corruption, namely the Law on State Property and the Law on Property Rights Relations.