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Suspicious tenders and spying on journalists: a small Serbian town in the grip of corruption
Three hundred kilometers from Belgrade, in the Serbian capital where an unprecedented anti-corruption movement has taken hold, the independent media outlet FAR has investigated the questionable practices of the mayor of the town of Dimitrovgrad. Their work has put them in the crosshairs of the country’s powerful intelligence services. Forbidden Stories joined forces with FAR to investigate shady public construction contracts.
Traces of clashes between supporters and opponents of the regime following the large demonstration on March 15 in front of the Parliament in Belgrade. (Credit: Alexander Abdelilah / Forbidden Stories)
- A FAR journalist was targeted with cyber-surveillance tools while investigating alleged corruption in Dimitrovgrad
- According to documents we consulted, calls for tender appear to have been drawn up in such a way as to favor Drumovi A&D, a construction company known to have botched recent projects in Dimitrovgrad.
- Our investigation reveals the links between the mayor of Dimitrovgrad and companies close to the clinic that employs him, including potential conflicts of interests.
By Alexander Abdelilah (Forbidden Stories) and FAR (Serbia)
May 14th, 2025
While the streets of Belgrade still echo with the anti-corruption slogans of the country’s biggest protest movement in decades held on March 15, a lesser-known battle is taking place in southeastern Serbia.
Its trigger: a small-scale version of the abusive practices that drove hundreds of thousands of Serbs into the streets, brandishing images of bloodied hands that symbolize the “corruption that kills” (see below). These practices have shaken the online media FAR located in the 8,000-person town of Dimitrovgrad, near the Bulgarian border, 300 kilometers from the capital, to its core. Local journalists at the online media FAR, whose reporting made them the mayor’s bête noire, were the target of an aggressive destabilization operation.
The national movement shaking Serbia was formed in memory of the 16 victims killed in an accident at the main train station in Novi Sad—the country’s second largest city with a population of 300,000—on November 1, 2024, when a canopy collapsed. Beyond this individual incident, the many gray areas and suspicions of wrongdoing surrounding the train station’s public contract have made it a symbol of corruption in the country.
The scandal is part of a much broader hardening of the regime. Serbs were hoping for a return to democracy after the fall of dictator Slobodan Milošević on October 5, 2000, but one man quickly dashed their hopes. His name was Aleksandar Vučić, Milošević’s former Minister of Information in the late 1990s. Vučić, serving a second term as President, worked to sideline the opposition and silence independent media. In that time, the country has dropped 44 places in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index and 27 places in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index.
Vučić’s regime has been accused of misusing the media to “gain an unfair political advantage, attack political opponents, and spread disinformation,” according to a European Parliament report from 2022. This offensive has spared no one, from the capital to the farthest reaches of the country. According to Aleksandar Djordjevic, a journalist with the Serbian branch of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, journalists are “targeted by the state and the police in order to protect the ruling party. Democratic institutions in Serbia are in grave danger.” So much so that two of Djordjevic's colleagues were the target of an attempted hack using Pegasus spyware last February, according to Amnesty International's Security Lab.
Credit: Stefan Pavic
The many hats of Dimitrovgrad's mayor
Unlike the tragedy in Novi Sad, no one died in Dimitrovgrad, a small town nestled into the green hills near the Bulgarian border. However, questions about the allocation of public contracts are also at the heart of the tensions between FAR’s journalists and Mayor Vladica Dimitrov. Dimitrov, an apparatchik of the ruling SNS party, has virulently attacked FAR in his nine years in office. “Let’s be clear … it’s an opposition media outlet,” he told a local TV station in March 2023, after FAR revealed the city’s order of an Audi A6. This was one of many attacks suffered by local reporter Slaviša Milanov and his colleagues since FAR was founded in 2016.
Hills surrounding Dimitrovgrad (Credit: Alexander Abdelilah / Forbidden Stories)
Anti-corruption messages hung on the front of a store in downtown Dimitrovgrad (Credit: Alexander Abdelilah / Forbidden Stories)
The attacks accelerated when the media started to look into the construction of a four-story building on a rather run-down street in the neighboring town of Pirot. The building, constructed by Drumovi A&D – a local company that has won numerous public tenders -, houses a private medical clinic with state-of-the-art equipment, staffed by dozens of specialists. Among them was Dimitrov himself, who works as a radiologist. It was this parallel role that led FAR journalists to take a closer look at the mayor’s activities.
Milanov and his colleagues turned their attention to a small circle of individuals and companies gravitating around Dimitrov. The owners of Deva Med Group, which holds the clinic’s equipment, include Goran Denčić, who detains the building of the clinic, and Snezana Mitic, the mayor’s sister-in-law. Goran Denčić’s wife, Nevena Denčić, has a 50% stake in the public works company Drumovi A&D. This Denčić couple thus benefits from public contracts in the Dimitrovgrad area, while also owning the building and equipment of the clinic in which the mayor of the town works as a radiologist.
Credit: Forbidden Stories
The health center, built by Drumovi A&D, also employs the mayor’s partner, Vanja Dimitrov, an obstetrician-gynecologist. And the director of Deva Med Group is Maja Cvitanovic Vujanovic, who was hired in Dimitrovgrad’s administration back in 2019.
Despite the crystal-clear evidence, in early 2024, some news stopped FAR in its tracks. Forbidden Stories went on the ground to continue the investigation with local journalists.
A journalist interrogated and cyber-monitored
Behind the wheel of his car on a sunny morning late last March, Milanov improvised a tour of the construction sites in Pirot and Dimitrovgrad operated by Drumovi A&D, the company supposedly close to the mayor and the private clinic. In one spot, he noted that a piece of sidewalk had been hastily renovated. In another, the road was falling apart. Resembling a mountain guide in his orange down jacket and sports sunglasses, the local journalist knew every nook and cranny of this hilly territory, the topography of which traces everything from the area’s historical Ottoman influence to its history of enforced disappearances under Tito, which still haunt people’s minds.
Slavisa Milanov et Sergej Ivanov dans les rues de Dimitrovgrad (Crédit : Alexander Abdelilah / Forbidden Stories)
It was behind this same steering wheel that, in February 2024, Milanov was stopped by police officers and escorted to a police station. There, while officers questioned him at length about his activities as a journalist, spyware was installed on his smartphone, capable of extracting encrypted exchanges, personal photos and names of sources—including those informing him of the links between the mayor and the clinic, prompting some to break off all contact with the reporter. The software, called NoviSpy, was spotted by experts at Amnesty International’s Security Lab after Milanov discovered that mobile data and wifi had been turned off on his phone during the police interview. In a report, Amnesty lists multiple links between NoviSpy and the Serbian intelligence service BIA, allowing a “clear attribution of this spyware family and campaign to BIA.” Contacted by Forbidden Stories, the BIA and Serbian state authorities did not respond to our requests.
Drumovi A&D’s logo (Credit : Drumovi A&D)
The Deva Med clinic, in Pirot (Credit : Alexander Abdelilah / Forbidden Stories)
This was just another roadblock in an already risky investigation. The elements could not be published on the FAR website out of fear of legal repercussions. With no better options, some of the findings were shared on the FAR journalists’ personal Facebook profiles as acts of defiance in an increasingly repressive climate.
Vesna Radojevic, a journalist with the Crime and Corruption Reporting Network (KRIK), told Forbidden Stories that this is an “absurd” situation. “It’s just some small stories about a local government, and our state was ready to use and misuse its funding to install NoviSpy in [Milanov’s] telephone to see, ‘Okay, who is your source?’” she said.
Following the revelation of the hacking last December by Amnesty International, tensions have not subsided—quite the opposite, in fact. In February, Sergej Ivanov, a colleague of Milanov’s, was publicly accused by the mayor of attempting to bribe local elected officials, prompting the journalist to lodge a complaint.
Favoritism and botched construction projects
Neither Milanov nor his colleagues doubt that their work on the mayor’s alleged favoritism, including regarding Drumovi A&D and the clinic, has earned them this animosity. They are convinced that, for the past several years, public contracts have been drawn up in such a way as to favor Drumovi A&D and exclude potential competitors. A web of interests has been put in place, the mayor and his wife being employed in the clinic tied to the mayor’s sister-in-law and in which the Denčić couple, also co-owners of Drumovi A&D, are involved. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement at the expense of the people of Dimitrovgrad, where some of Drumovi’s construction projects are being visibly botched.
A stroll down Dimitrovgrad’s main street reveals the consequences of this lack of competition. In the air, a cheerful string of lights snakes between the lampposts. But on the ground, the sidewalk bears the apparent signs of wear and tear, with cracked paved tiles and hollowed-out sections. Nonetheless, these sidewalks were laid by Drumovi A&D just over a year ago. When asked about this point, as on others, the company did not respond.
Signs of wear on the recently renovated sidewalk by Drumovi A&D, in downtown Dimitrovgrad (Credit: Alexander Abdelilah / Forbidden Stories)
According to the FAR journalists, this case represents evidence of the manipulation of public contracts in Dimitrovgrad.
With his nose buried in documents scattered across a small yellow table in FAR’s offices, Jovan Ružić discovered the hidden reality of the bid in which he had participated in August 2023. As the boss of a company competing with Drumovi A&D and active in the sector for 33 years, Ružić didn’t appreciate what he saw. The accounting documents in his hand, obtained by Milanov and his colleague Ivanov, lent credence to the theory that Drumovi A&D had received preferential treatment from the Dimitrovgrad city administration.
The line that Ružić was most upset about from the documents concerned the replacement and renovation of 220 concrete stones lining the sidewalk, for which Drumovi invoiced €0. To him, the message was clear: the company didn’t replace any of the stones, and the city didn’t object.
“I calculated the handling, transport, laying and grouting of the kerbstones in accordance with the public contract and the appropriate price. Otherwise, my bid would have been lower, and I would have won the contract,” said Ružić, suspecting that there was an informal agreement between the mayor and Drumovi to guarantee the company’s victory.
Ivanov and Milanov were able to detect two other items invoiced by Drumovi for the same construction site—a barrier and a billboard, costing almost €500—that appear to have disappeared into thin air, according to the journalists, whose offices are close by.
Vladica Dimitrov, mayor of Dimitrovgrad (Credit: FAR TV).
The mayor refutes these accusations, insisting that the barrier and billboard were indeed installed “according to the statements and written certification of the supervisory authority on that project” and that “there is no agreement to favor anyone in the public procurement process.” Regarding its ties to the Pirot clinic, the mayor and Goran Denčić (via his company Deva Med Group) offer the same line of defense. The company informed Forbidden Stories that “the polyclinics operating in the same premises as the Deva Med group are [separate companies] and have no ownership ties with the group,” and that Deva Med Group “has no business relationship with the Drumovi A&D company, nor with the municipality of Dimitrovgrad.” The two polyclinics mentioned by Deva Med Group did not respond to our questions. Mayor Vladica Dimitrov, for his part, sees it only as “an attractive opportunity for all doctors, including us, who have absolutely the same rights as everyone else under the law.”
According to Sergej and Slaviša, these alleged irregularities are part of a much wider financial relationship. To get to the bottom of this, we wanted to verify the extent of the public money windfall Drumovi A&D is benefiting from by analyzing all the public contracts the company has won since 2021. In all, according to calculations by FAR and Forbidden Stories, Drumovi A&D and its partners have won just under €6 million in public contracts, including €1,7 million in Dimitrovgrad alone.
Of the 58 public contracts won by the firm, more than 40% were won in cases where Drumovi A&D and its partners were the sole bidders. “This means that the criteria for awarding the contract were probably tailor-made for a specific bidder,” explained Rastko Naumov, a lawyer specializing in public procurement and author of the latest annual report on the state of public procurement in Serbia for the Center for Applied European Studies.
Slaviša Milanov and Sergej Ivanov speak with contractor Jovan Ružić about alleged corruption in municipal tenders (Credit: Alexander Abdelilah / Forbidden Stories)
This practice was confirmed in another call for tenders, published by the city at the end of 2023, for the renovation of Maršala Tita Street on the outskirts of Dimitrovgrad. Among the technical criteria demanded by the city, those concerning the asphalt production capacity of the candidates caused another Drumovi A&D competitor, Kubiktrans Plus, to take exception. The firm lodged an appeal with the Republic Commission for the Protection of Rights in Public Procurement Procedures, obtained by Forbidden Stories. “Only one manufacturer within a 70 kilometres radius met the required capacity, which could lead to a monopoly position,” the appeal reads.
These requirements “could be an indicator of corruption and illicit agreements between the contracting authority and the bidder,” Naumov, the public procurement lawyer, suggested. In its response to the administrative appeal, the city dismissed the criticism, citing “bad experiences” in the past to justify the restrictions. Following the rejection of Kubiktrans Plus’ appeal, only one company applied for the public contract worth over €340,000: Drumovi A&D. An amount that will ultimately exceed €480,000 after a request for additional work from the city.
This exclusive information tends to confirm FAR journalists’ suspicions of favoritism by the mayor of Dimitrovgrad.
Seated in a traditional restaurant by the railroad, Milanov wants to believe that the movement underway in the country has already changed mentalities, including in his own municipality. He pointed to the anti-corruption demonstrations that have taken place in Dimitrovgrad since the beginning of the year as proof of this. As he talked to us, Milanov typed away on his phone. Since being hacked, he’s used a smartphone that was examined and verified by cybersecurity experts; a sign that in Dimitrovgrad, and across Serbia, journalists investigating corruption must remain vigilant.
After being taken to the police station and realizing that someone had looked through my smartphone, it drove me crazy. It was a shocking realization that the institution that was supposed to protect me as a citizen had instead targeted and compromised my personal security. I was frustrated and felt a mixture of anger, disappointment, distrust and worry.
After this incident, you decided not to publish the information you had gathered. How did you react after Forbidden Stories contacted you?
I found it very positive. It was very motivating and encouraging for me and my team. I realized that we had an opportunity to present our story to the world. It's good to consider cooperation at the international level. In addition, when you have strong partners, you feel better protected against repression.
After this publication, how do you think press freedom and civil liberties in Serbia will evolve?
For media freedom in Serbia, the situation is in a clear downward spiral, with each year bringing further erosion. Civil society actors advocating for democratic principles increasingly face arrests, detentions, and even physical attacks. Looking ahead, I anticipate a further escalation of repression, acts of revenge, and the misuse of state institutions to shield corrupt politicians. However, international exposure through publications like this one exerts pressure on the government and brings crucial international and local attention to these issues.
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