Successful candidates in competitions as victims of corruption, party and family clans

Dino Rizvanović, an unemployed sports professor, registered under code 0025 at the recently concluded competition of the Federal Police Administration (FUP) for the admission of 88 new police officers, just like Dejan Golijan registered under code 0705, on December 13 did not receive an invitation to sign the contract, although according to the achieved results they had to be among the accepted candidates, writing Inforadar.ba.

We remind you that the FUP competition was opened in May 2020 and lasted for an inexplicably long time, a year and a half. It was finally completed a few days ago, and the whole process was full of nepotism and corruption, mass family and party employment, which Inforadar reported on several occasions.

Lists with names and surnames 

It is about hiring 80 police officers in their initial ranks, 40 for the Uniformed Police Sector, 40 for the Special Police Unit, and eight more junior inspectors. The decision on the accepted candidates was signed on October 15 this year by the acting director of the FUP, Ensad Korman. On the official list of 88 selected participants are represented by codes, not names, although the law prescribes transparency. Also, the lists with names and surnames had to be visible not only on the FUP website, but also on the FUP bulletin board, and to be delivered to all organizational units, as they were not.

As we find out, the accepted candidates were recently called by phone to sign the contract, without it being published on the official website of the FUP, which is again an obvious example of non-transparency which was obvious through the entire competition procedure.

Dino Rizvanović, who told Inforadar, encouraged by similar stories we published, applied for the Special Police Unit. He won 49 points in the first competition, as did the last four candidates. He was rejected for inexplicable reasons, although he should have had extra points as the child of the killed fighter. However, Rizvanovic’s appeal, like all others, went to waste.

“I have successfully completed all physical fitness tests. While waiting for the date of testing for acrophobia and hydrophobia, and the fitness march that is not scored, I got coronavirus. I asked for another test appointment in time, but It was denied. And without that, I would be among the top 20 candidates. The Police Board and President Zoran Čegar responded negatively to my complaint with valid documentation. In the new appeal, they said that I had the right to appeal and that I did not appeal, completely ignoring the fact that I had an earlier decision when they rejected my application, ” Rizvanović told Inforadar.

The FUP’s Board of Appeals, headed by President Zoran Čegar, rejected all complaints without a valid legal explanation, which is not surprising given Čegar’s scandalous statement for a local TV station that “he will always take a police officer’s child first, even if their results are worse than the results of someone unknown to them. ”

Most of the aggrieved candidates have already filed complaints with the competent court, while Sanel Krčalo, Aldin Imamović, and Armin Šator have hired lawyers and filed a joint lawsuit against the responsible FUP leaders today (Wednesday, December 22). We remind you that the three of them, along with eliminated Malik Mustajbašić, were among the best candidates on testing!

Aldin Imamović, Master of Defense and Security, who graduated from university 11 years ago and never worked in the profession for which he was educated, says for our portal:

“Many lawyers have so far confirmed that our rejections are unfounded. This is a precedent because it has never happened that someone is degraded and removed from the list in this way “, says Imamović.

Reason for their disqualification

And they were eliminated by a perfidious game that lasted a year and a half. Namely, the reason for their disqualification was “legally” disputed by the fact that according to the competition they applied for in the first half of 2020, in August 2022, ie almost two and a half years later, when they were supposed to establish employment after the training, will reach the age of 35, which is the upper limit provided by the law for recruitment.

However, Inforadar found out that the age limit has been coldly ignored on at least seven occasions in the past few years. It has been confirmed to our portal that seven candidates today are FMUP police officers, even though they were 35 or older at the time of signing the contract, which only confirms the discriminatory attitude towards the four best, whose positions were in advance intended for suitable, those “known from earlier” and children of police chiefs.

The fourth among them is Malik Mustajbašić, who was 32 years old when he applied for the FUP competition. Malik was registered under code 0340 and did not pass. Malik is highly educated, a champion in kickboxing, otherwise an employee of the Armed Forces of BiH. For Inforadar, he says that this is his 16th competition in various places, that he won the maximum number of points on knowledge tests and physical tests, but that he would get the lowest number of points in interviews.

“Simply put, competitions are set up in such a way that if you don’t have anyone (to give you a push), you won’t get a job.”

Now everything is in court, from which the harmed candidates expect to annul the competition (and thus prove nepotism and corruption at the top of the FUP) because it has a lot of facts and evidence of irregularities, starting with the duration of the competition, complete non-transparency of the process, setting up positions for eligible candidates (Inforadar has already published the names of the children of police chiefs admitted to the competition) and the elimination of the best by the arbitrariness of the commission and those who decide on it.

Dejan Golian’s appeal will also be brought before the Court. For Inforadar, Golian says that the national key was not respected during the competition. Namely, the Law stipulates that when selecting candidates, the provisions of Article 4 of the Law on Police Officers of the Federation of BiH must be respected, which stipulates that “the structure of police officers in the police body reflects the national structure of the FBiH population according to the 1991 census” and Article 11. Law on Internal Affairs of the Federation of BiH (“Official Gazette of the Federation of BiH”, No. 81/14). Nowhere in the decision on the selection of candidates was it stated that they were guided by this law.

Since the candidates on the list were represented only by codes, the public could not know whether the national key was respected. Only later, in the media appearance of Zoran Čegar, we learned that seven non-Bosniaks were received. It remains unclear how he knows this fact if, as he says, he did not have insight into the names of the candidates, but only the codes.

Candidates for employment

“On November 4, I received a response from the FUP in which I was provided with an overview of the national structure of employed police officers, but I was not approved and provided with a list of selected candidates for employment, with names and nationalities,” Golian testified. :

“They state that two candidates were selected on the basis of the highest number of points achieved on the test of physical ability, and two candidates in accordance with the provisions of the Law on Gender Equality in BiH. The head of the FUP, Ensad Korman, withdrew from the list of Selection Committee in order to satisfy the gender representation and to hire a candidate based on the highest number of points on the physical fitness test. My physical ability is unquestionable, but they damaged me because I am on the list of the Commission 49., while the candidates under the codes 0918, 0975, and 1613 were below me. However, they ended up on Corman’s final list. So, on the list published by the Commission on the website, I was in 56th place, while the candidates with these codes were below me, in 58th, 59th and 62nd place. This possibility of deviation is not prescribed by any valid legal document “, Golijan points out.

Our findings from the FMUP indicate that this is not the real reason for frequent corrections of the list of recruits, but that ways were sought to insert the children of certain FUP employees and FUP leaders close to the administration, as well as children of some high-ranking employees of other security services in BiH.

The President of the Admissions Committee was Ibro Bešlija, a member of the Police Board, who in this way knowingly withdrew from the proceedings because the Board decided on appeals in the competition. Among the accepted candidates as a junior inspector is the second son of Mustafa Hujdurović, otherwise the head of the Internal Control Unit of the FMUP, which, interestingly, should control the legal work of the FMUP, while another son of Hujdurović was accepted in the previous competition for the position of junior inspector. First-class nepotism (two brothers and a father in the same institution) is just one of the competition abuses, because out of a total of 88 accepted on the list, about 30 per cent of the candidates are children or close relatives of employees or police chiefs, according to our FUP sources.

And that’s not all. The impartiality of the commission for physical testing of candidates is also questionable. Ibro Bešlija, as the president of the Commission, chose his friends on his own initiative to test the physical fitness of the candidates – and sent the list to Director Korman for signing.

The general knowledge test, including the written work on the given topic, was not performed and organized in the correct way. Due to epidemiological measures, the candidates were divided into a number of groups. Two working groups were tested each working day. The first group took the test on February 17, 2021, and the last one on March 9, 2021. The questions, as well as the topic for the written work, have not changed. It is logical that in the interaction with each other, individual candidates learned in advance the questions and topic for written work from close colleagues who had been tested before.

The next fact is that the morphological measurements were not performed by the doctor, but by the members of the Commission. Some candidates came for a medical examination outside the schedule, and also some of the candidates subsequently brought the results of medical examinations from private clinics.

Competition was irregular

In view of all the above, a lawful reaction was expected from the Police Appeals Board and Zoran Čegar, who told Inforadar before the final list that “he is under pressure and will make a decision on the appeals”, and then changed his mind.

After several stories of Inforadar about this big affair, the Minister of Police of FBiH, Aljoša Čampara, has already sent three reports to the addresses of the State and Cantonal Prosecutor’s Office and the Independent Board of the FBiH Parliament. Among other things, Čampara reported the acting director of the FUP, Ensad Korman, who signed the decision on the selection of candidates for employment in the FUP, and asked for all clarifications.

Almost a month later, Korman also reacted, but not in public, he submitted his answer to Minister Čampara. Corman distances himself and transfers all responsibility to the Commission, although with his signature on October 15., Corman made the irregularity of the competition official, throwing out four best candidates.

In the meantime, the Agency for Personal Data Protection of BiH actually confirmed that the competition was irregular by stating that there was no obstacle to publishing the names of the candidates, instead of doing it with codes.

Despite everything, as Inforadar finds out, the top of the FUP continues with the further procedure, so two days ago (Monday, December 20) the training of accepted candidates at the Police Academy began, although there are likely chances that the Court will overturn the competition. By the way, the Academy for the implementation of education, vocational training, and advanced training of only one candidate for six months costs about 5,000 KM. Among other things, it is clear how much financial damage would be done to the budget of the Federation of BiH in the event that the competition is overthrown in the phase of the academic part of the competition procedure.

Investigating the background of this story, Inforadar came across data and examples that entire families are employed within one police institution and that the case of the head of the Unit for Professional Standards Mustafa Hujdurović and his two sons is not a precedent. Namely, that is the case with the Sinanović couple. Husband Aldin is the head of the War Crimes Department, and wife Amra is employed in the public procurement department. Apart from them, spouses Dario and Marina Zović, Ramiza and Mihret Rotić, brothers Semin and Senad Kadić, brothers Milošević also work in the FUP, one of whom is an inspector in the internal control sector and the other in the uniformed police sector, then brother and sister Sanela and Edin Fazlić, and many others. All of them are mostly high-ranking employees.

That corruption and nepotism are embodied in the very system of functioning of the federal MUP, as well as cantonal MUPs, is shown by the example of graduate criminologist Đana Salčinović. Đana applied, like Malik, to numerous competitions of various police institutions. The last time was in 2020 for the competition in the Ministry of the Interior of the ZDK for the position of “junior inspector”.

As a candidate under code 881 for the rank of “junior inspector”, after fulfilling the general and special conditions, she entered the ten-month competition procedure supervised by Transparency International BiH, precisely because of the ever-present nepotism. She successfully passed all the tests, interview and medical examinations. Although the medical commission stated on two occasions that she was capable of work, with vision correction, she was excluded from the further procedure:

“On the website of the Ministry of the Interior, on August 25, 2021, I read that I, as a candidate under code 881, did not satisfy the medical examination. After writing to the authorities, I was told that I had been found fit to work from a health point of view, but that I had been eliminated because of Article 7 (dress standard) which provided that ‘a police officer is not allowed to have a tattoo on visible parts of the body’. I was not even left with the possibility of a legal remedy “, says Salčinović.

However, throughout this competition, she says, Article 7 is not mentioned in general, special conditions or regulations, stating that her tattoos are not in a visible place. Salčinović states that at the time of the tender procedure they were in the phase of laser removal, which is also stated in the medical history, ie “not to violate the code of ethics nor should they be the basis for elimination in the then phase of the tender procedure.”

Our sources from the Zenica Ministry of the Interior state that Đana Salčinović was literally examined for a “hair in the egg” because of her expertise and abilities, and that she probably did not give money for a job, which is a common practice in most cases, and also not close to any political party, which also opens the door wide to police jobs.

All these facts are known to the cantonal and state prosecutor’s offices, as well as to the Independent Committee of the FBiH Parliament, which have not yet broken the silence to the proven crime in one of the most important institutions in the country. It is interesting that for almost two months now, the always loud parliamentarians have been silent, who probably consider such systemic corruption and nepotism common.