Cashing in… and out: Serbia

An odd fact about Serbia today is that hardly anybody in the country seems curious about the way its official government financial figures don’t remotely add up. Alan Osborn investigates.

The authors of a US-sponsored report for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) published last October – ‘Money Laundering and Predicate Crime in Serbia 2000-2005’ – acknowledge the conventional shortages of staff and computers but say they “hit on a more fundamental void: lack of curiosity.” They say that if households spend more than they earn and save, for example, “then there are unaccounted funds… if the household spends systematically beyond its means there are reasons to speculate about how they make up for the deficit when they are not depleting its savings.” Also, “if more financial offences are detected, the suspicious transaction reporting should go up commensurately.”