Photo: TanjugThe municipality of Novi Beograd illegally legalized (legalized) an illegally built building owned by the mayor of Belgrade, Aleksandar Šapić, on Bežanijska Kosa, even though the legal requirements for legalizing that building were not met, documents collected by BIRN show.
At the end of July this year, a little more than a month after he became the mayor of Belgrade (June 20, 2022), Aleksandar Šapić received a decision from the municipality of Novi Beograd legalizing the building on Bežanijska kosa - a seven-room apartment with a usable area of 340 square meters (that is, 403 square meters of gross developed construction area), it says BIRN.
The municipality made this decision despite the fact that the facility it legalized did not exist in this form and with these dimensions on the satellite image of the Republic Geodetic Institute from 2015, which is a basic prerequisite for illegally built facilities to enter the legalization procedure at all, according to the Law on legalization of facilities.
According to the official documentation and publicly available satellite images, the investor, i.e. the owner of the building, Aleksandar Šapić, first in 2021, without a building permit, extended the already existing apartment on three levels, by making a "cube" out of the sloping roof on the first floor and the attic, and on the ground floor level, he also built a new, one-story part of the building, with a glass roof.
In July 2021, the City Building Inspection ordered Šapić to immediately stop the work and obtain a building permit, however, he did not do so, but filed a complaint with the Ministry of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure, writes BIRN.
At the moment when Tomislav Momirović's ministry overturned the decision of the city inspection and returned the procedure to the beginning - in October 2021 - satellite images show that the work on Šapić's disputed building was already nearing completion.
By the time the city inspection came out again - in August 2022 - the municipality of Novi Beograd, of which Šapić was president continuously for 10 years, from June 2012 to June 2022, had legalized this building, and the building inspector concluded that the conditions for the suspension of the proceedings have been met.
It was not the only procedure that was suspended by this legislation - on September 7, 2022, the Third Basic Prosecutor's Office in Belgrade dismissed the criminal complaint for the criminal offense of building without a building permit, which was filed against Mayor Šapić by his neighbor, because Deputy Public Prosecutor Jakša Stojanović found that "in the specific case, there is no illegality as a legal feature of the criminal offense, bearing in mind that the construction works are legal".
By the way, according to the Criminal Code, the criminal offense of construction without a building permit is punishable by imprisonment from 3 months to 3 years and a fine, and if the investor continues the construction after the decision to suspend the works, the prison sentence ranges from 1 to 8 years, also with a fine.
Chronology of illegal construction by Aleksandar Šapić
Aleksandar Šapić's neighbor Ljubinko Pejović, who shares a partition wall with the current mayor and is located in the neighboring house number of the same residential building on Bežanijska kosa, first reported the illegal construction to the city building inspection (Secretariat for Inspection Affairs of the City of Belgrade) at the end of May 2021 - in that at the moment the mayor of Belgrade is still Zoran Radojicic, and his deputy Goran Vesic, writes BIRN.
Then, at the beginning of June 2021, the neighbor Pejović submits two more submissions to the same authority because the inspection does not go to the field, and then, in mid-June, through his lawyer Vladimir Gajić, he also files a criminal complaint against the (then) president of the municipality of Novi Beograd for illegal construction , stating that Šapić is increasing the dimensions of the building without a building permit. As Pejović told BIRN, he had great problems finding lawyers and experts who wanted to take on the job, since several of them - before Gajić - gave up when they heard who it was...
Illegal construction in theory and practice
In an interview for NIN on August 25 of this year, Šapić said that there are cases that "in recent years, entire blocks have sprung up without any urban consideration and paperwork, so they resorted to "retroactive legalization", and that these days "we will start to remove some from those facilities and with that we will send a clear message that we will no longer tolerate it".
He repeated the same thing in September on RTS when he said that he "will not go and demolish people's houses just like that", but that he will do everything to bring order and peace in this city, "so that no one thinks that they will build entire blocks of settlements without a single piece of paper, that they will iron it retroactively, they will not watch that film here"...
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The municipality of Novi Beograd illegally legalized (legalized) an illegally built building owned by Aleksandar Šapić on Bežanijska Kosa, even though the legal requirements for legalizing that building were not met, documents collected by BIRN show.
