Serbian Defence Minister Denies Plotting Against Vucic

Serbian Defence Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic on Tuesday denied having committed "any criminal act and especially I am not someone who is a conspirator against President [Aleksandar] Vucic" after a former colleague accused him of gaining access to transcripts of covertly recorded phone calls involving Vucic.

"I don't want anyone to drag my name through the mud … and I especially don't want it to be associated with criminal clans, criminals, any kind of crime," he said in the video message.

He spoke out after Dijana Hrkalovic, a former state secretary in the Interior Ministry when Stefanovic was the minister, said on Saturday last week that Stefanovic had "got an unauthorised insight into the contents of telephone communications of the president and members of his family".

"He read transcripts of [Vucic's] conversations, without the President's knowledge, behind his back," she claimed.

On the subject of wiretapping Vucic, Stefanovic did not directly deny it. "Some of events from the past were also the result of my incompetence, bad assessments, mistakes I made", he said.

"I can't turn back time as much as I would like, and correct mistakes, but I can say a thing that is very important to me, which is that I never did anything … with the goal of inflicting damage either to President Vucic or to his family," Stefanovic said.

In February 2021, when Veljko Belivuk, an alleged organised crime gang boss and leader of a gang with connections to a number of state officials, was arrested, media close to the government started to spread claims that Vucic's conversations had been bugged.

In May 2021, Interior Minister Aleksandar Vulin acknowledged to MPs that 1,882 conversations had been recorded between Vucic or members of his...