Without Political Courage, There Can Be No Genuine Anti-Mafia Law

Press releases · 06/09/2026

Montenegro has already lost far too much time waiting for legislation tailored to a country in which organised crime and high-level corruption have generated enormous wealth over decades, while institutions have demonstrated that they are incapable of tracing and permanently confiscating it. After such a long wait, an insufficiently ambitious law has been adopted—one that does not fully meet the real needs of Montenegrin society.

The new law allows assets to be confiscated before a final conviction, but only in limited cases involving criminal organisations and only after an indictment has been confirmed by a court. This is not an autonomous civil asset forfeiture model of the kind MANS has advocated for years, but merely a limited addition to the existing system.

Even under this law, proceedings are not primarily directed against suspicious assets independently of criminal proceedings. Instead, they remain tied to a specific individual and the existence of a criminal case against that person. Even where confiscation before a final conviction is permitted, the law requires that criminal proceedings have already been initiated and that an indictment has been confirmed for offences committed within the framework of a criminal organisation.

Consequently, this law does not create a genuine possibility of retrospectively examining the origins of enormous assets accumulated over previous decades where their owners are not currently subject to relevant criminal proceedings. Most of the so-called initial accumulation of dirty capital will therefore remain beyond its effective reach, as will many individuals who enriched themselves during the transition period at the expense of citizens, state property and the public budget.

This is precisely the law’s greatest limitation. Montenegro will not be able simply to ask how someone without lawful income acquired assets worth millions. Instead, the institutions will first have to connect that person to a specific criminal offence and initiate the relevant criminal proceedings. After decades of institutional silence, time-barred cases, missing evidence and protected individuals, it is clear that a large portion of unlawfully acquired wealth will once again remain untouchable.

Such a framework may also leave beyond the law’s reach enormous assets that are manifestly disproportionate to lawful income in high-level corruption cases that are not formally linked to a criminal organisation. There is therefore a substantial difference between the political label of an “anti-mafia law” and what Parliament has actually adopted.

The law also fails to define with sufficient clarity exactly what the prosecution must prove for a court to conclude that particular assets were acquired through criminal activity. A discrepancy between assets and lawful income must constitute an important basis for initiating proceedings, but it must not become a substitute for a thorough financial investigation and concrete evidence.

The existing capacity of the prosecution service and the police to conduct financial investigations presents a particular problem. Montenegro does not have enough specialised financial investigators, economic and tax experts, forensic accountants or prosecutors trained to trace complex financial flows, concealed ownership, international transactions, corporate structures and digital assets.

The establishment of financial investigation teams is left by the law as a mere possibility, instead of being mandatory in complex organised crime and high-level corruption cases. The law establishes neither minimum staffing and technical standards nor deadlines for exchanging information, and it fails to clearly define the accountability of institutions that do not provide information or act upon requests from the prosecution service.

Without serious investment in personnel, databases and international cooperation, the new law could remain yet another instrument that exists only on paper. Financial investigations cannot be treated as an appendix to criminal investigations. They must begin immediately, run in parallel with them and trace the entire flow of money—including legal and beneficial owners, associated persons, family members, companies and assets held abroad.

It is also problematic that provisional asset freezing may remain in place for years without mandatory periodic judicial review. At the same time, the executive branch and the authority responsible for managing state property are granted broad powers to manage private companies, lease assets and, in certain circumstances, even sell them before a final court decision has been rendered.

These powers are not accompanied by an appropriate level of transparency. The law provides for the maintenance of records, but does not require institutions to regularly publish comprehensive and comparable data on the results of its implementation.

The public must know how many financial investigations have been initiated and discontinued, how much property has been provisionally frozen, how much has been permanently confiscated, how much has been returned to its owners and how much compensation citizens have paid as a result of unsuccessful proceedings. Information must also be made available on who manages confiscated companies, to whom assets have been leased or assigned for use, the price at which they were sold, who assessed their value, and the costs of safeguarding and managing them.

Without such information, the authorities will once again be able to present the value of provisionally frozen assets as a final result, even though some of those assets may subsequently be returned to their owners. MANS has warned for years that provisional confiscation does not constitute a success if the proceedings are not based on a thorough investigation and do not result in a final and binding confiscation order.

The real test of this law will therefore not be the number of proceedings initiated, prosecution service announcements or press conferences, but the value of assets that are permanently confiscated through final court decisions, properly preserved and returned to the citizens.

An even more important test will be whether the law is applied equally to everyone—to members of both the former and the current authorities, as well as their business partners, family members and associated persons. Selective enforcement would turn this law into an instrument of political retaliation rather than a mechanism for combating organised crime and corruption.

Montenegro needed a genuine anti-mafia law based on civil proceedings against suspicious assets, robust financial investigations, specialised and independent institutions, strict judicial oversight and full transparency in the management of confiscated property.

What has been adopted is a step in that direction, but it is far too small a step for a country that has already lost decades while criminal wealth grew unhindered, changed hands, was concealed behind associated persons and left Montenegro.

A proper legislative solution requires far greater vision and political courage, and far less concern for party calculations and the profit-driven interests of individuals who continue to find ways to protect their empires built on dirty money. For as long as such interests take precedence over the public interest, Montenegro will not have a law capable of genuinely striking at the economic power of organised crime and corruption.

Dejan Milovac
Director of the MANS Investigative Centre