he Commissioner for the information of public importance has received numerous complaints against a group of state-owned enterprises and agencies submitted by the Administrative Committee of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia, related to the withholding of the information on the representational costs and on the so-called “managerial fringe benefits.” The Commissioner has assessed that the fact that the body such as the Administrative Committee of the Assembly, in a short period and for the second time, had to request from the Commissioner for Information the protection of the rights, goes to show that there is a very worrying position which managements in numerous state-owned enterprises show towards the rights of the public guaranteed by the Constitution and the law. The Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic particularly stressed the following:
“This situation reflects either a basic ignorance of the contents of the Law on Free Access to Information and the rights guaranteed by this law or, which is even worse, a conscious and intentional ignoring of the proper legal obligations by some state-owned enterprises.
The law on free access to information stipulates that everybody has the right to have, in principle, any information created in the course of the operations or related to the operations of a government agency made available to him/her.
Other than the state bodies, bodies of the autonomous province and local self-governments, respectively, the law stipulates that the notion of a government agency also covers the subjects to whom public authorities have been delegated and the legal entities whose founder and financier is the state. This means that public enterprises and other state-owned enterprises have the same obligations towards the public as the bodies of the state authorities.
If this was not clear to somebody at the beginning of the enforcement of the law, it should certainly be so after three years. This is the reason why I recently assessed as absurd the situation in which many state-owned enterprises submitted their data on the salaries of their management to the Administrative Committee only after interventions and the order of the Commissioner for Information. Nonetheless, it is for the second time and in a short period that they withhold from the parliamentary Administrative Committee the data which by the law must be available to the widest public.
On this occasion, the withholding of the information was not even done with references to some reasons, such as “confidentiality” or “secrecy” of the data, regardless of the obvious lack of grounds for such reasons. The requests were simply ignored, although this is, by the law, inadmissible and actionable. By expressing such position towards the request of a body such as the parliamentary Administrative Committee, an unambiguous message is sent on a complete lack of readiness to respond to possible similar, justified requests of the citizens and the media which are based on the law.”
