In Serbia, closeness to power has come with something close to legal immunity.
by Klea Ukaj | 9 March 2026
In Serbia, it is not enough to know the right people. It helps if the right people know when to look away.
A Montenegrin drug crew needed somewhere safe to stash cocaine offloaded from a cruise ship in Lisbon. According to Sky ECC intercepts published this week by the Montenegrin outlet Vijesti, their solution was disarmingly simple: drive it to the Serbian embassy.
The ambassador at the time was Oliver Antić — a founding member of the Serbian Progressive Party of President Aleksandar Vučić. Antić had been shadowed by controversy long before his death under disputed circumstances in 2022. His name had surfaced in the “Index” corruption scandal involving alleged exam-selling at the University of Kragujevac. More gravely, a criminal complaint filed by a family member alleged that he had sexually abused his then nine-year-old daughter between 2020 and 2021. The allegation was never resolved following his death.
The Sky ECC messages do not prove that the Serbian embassy actually served as a narcotics depot. They do something arguably more troubling: they show that organized crime figures believed it could.
That assumption alone says something about the perceived permeability of state institutions.
It would be convenient to treat the Lisbon episode as an isolated embarrassment. It is not.
Over the past several years, a pattern has emerged around Serbia’s governing circle that goes beyond the ordinary corruption associated with entrenched political machines. The issue is not the existence of criminal figures in the orbit of power — that is a common enough feature of consolidated systems across the region. What distinguishes the Serbian case is the direction in which legal proceedings consistently travel: downward, away from consequence, away from the political core.
Consider the cases in sequence.
The most notorious is the Jovanjica affair, one of the largest marijuana operations ever discovered in the region. When police raided the plantation in 2019, prosecutors alleged that its owner, Predrag Koluvija, had overseen a vast illegal cultivation network. What made the case extraordinary was not merely its scale but the alleged involvement of state structures: members of Serbia’s security services were accused of providing protection to the farm.
Koluvija spent two years in pre-trial detention before being released pending trial. Throughout the process, President Vučić publicly questioned the proportionality of the prosecution. His legal defense was handled by Vladimir Đukanović — a lawyer and SNS parliamentarian whose relationship with his client became sufficiently controversial that Serbia’s Bar Association fined him after he conducted a televised interview with Koluvija. Years later, the case remains unresolved. The institutional fallout has been minimal.
Then came Konjuh.
In a village in central Serbia, police discovered nearly five tonnes of marijuana on the estate of businessman Rade Spasojević — a seizure larger even than the Jovanjica haul. Opposition politicians from Kruševac noted that Spasojević was a close associate of Interior Minister Bratislav Gašić, one of Vučić’s most loyal political allies. The investigation continues. Gašić remains in government.
The third case concerns Vučić’s own godfather, businessman Nikola Petrović, whose traffic collision in March 2023 produced the clearest evidence of how justice bends near the political center. Police tests reportedly detected both alcohol and cocaine in his system. The matter was initially treated as a criminal case. It was quietly downgraded to a misdemeanor. The misdemeanor conviction was overturned on appeal. Two years passed. The statute of limitations expired. Petrović now faces no legal consequences.
Most recently, Serbian media reported that a man photographed among Vučić’s security entourage at an event organized by the pro-government tabloid Informer was later found by police carrying 34 packets of heroin. The suspect, Petar Filipović, was questioned two months after the arrest. Prosecutors declined to seek pre-trial detention, classifying the offense as possession for personal use. A conditional sentence was proposed.
Each of these cases, examined individually, has plausible legal explanations. Prosecutors must work within evidentiary standards; courts must follow procedural rules; statutes of limitation are real constraints. None of those principles are controversial.
What is striking is that those explanations operate in only one direction.
This pattern does not demonstrate that Serbia’s president runs a criminal network. There is no evidence for such a claim and it should not be made. What it does suggest is something institutionally significant: the machinery of law enforcement appears structurally reluctant to pursue cases that intersect too closely with the governing patronage system. Whether that reluctance reflects explicit instruction or internalized caution hardly matters to the outcome.
For the Western Balkans, the implications extend beyond Serbia’s domestic politics.
The Sky ECC communications that exposed the Lisbon embassy episode are part of the same encrypted messaging trove that has unraveled major trafficking networks across Europe. Investigations based on those intercepts have already revealed connections among criminal groups operating in Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, and Kosovo. Organized crime in the Balkans does not respect administrative borders. When criminal actors treat state infrastructure — even hypothetically, even aspirationally — as safe storage facilities, the result is not merely reputational damage. It represents a structural vulnerability in the region’s security architecture.
The second implication concerns institutional credibility. Serbia’s accession negotiations with the European Union remain formally active. Belgrade plays a central role in the EU-facilitated dialogue with Pristina, a process premised on the assumption that Serbian institutions can engage in good-faith compliance with rule-of-law commitments. The cases outlined here do not prove that assumption false. They do raise a harder question than Brussels currently appears willing to ask: whether Serbia’s prosecutorial and judicial systems are capable of investigating politically sensitive cases at all — or whether the appearance of functioning justice has become the product itself.
Diplomatic culture prefers procedural continuity to uncomfortable conclusions. The accession process continues. Dialogue meetings take place. Progress reports are drafted and filed.
Meanwhile, the pattern persists.
The president’s proximity problem is not, in the end, his alone. It belongs to every institution that has processed these cases and found, each time, a reason to stop just short of consequence.
About the author:
Klea Ukaj writes from Michigan and contributes to The Kosovo Dispatch’s trans-Atlantic coverage.
