How did this manager sell in this column, what did he earn it and why is he given space in a column in which guests are either very famous or those who should be very responsible? If his sister Ana had not risen to a position in the Government of Serbia in 2016, it is unlikely that anyone would have dealt with the image and work of the man whose biography and job description will read "Brother of Ana Brnabić".
If there are "witnesses" for her, that is, people who can talk about how she was "before" and where you could meet her, for her brother Igor it is a rather closed field and it seems that he had the path of an ordinary nerd: a good student who tried to "finish school", those for which he was capable, and at an early stage of interest in the digital world to start jobs that will bring him into the "spotlight" of the public in recent years and days.
There isn't even much indication that the brother and sister worked much together, but their shared focus on digital technologies is an interesting indicator, and the coincidence of Igor's managerial rise at the same time as Anna's political advancement is interesting.
The company Aseko, its subsidiary for Southeast Europe, came into the spotlight again when the Serbian opposition politician Marinika Tepić raised the issue of conflict of interest by pointing out the jobs that the said company received in fact with the approval of the Prime Minister. Although the "attack" was readily met and retaliated with a burst of fire, as it coincided with the story of the influence of Andrej Vučić, the brother of Aleksandar Vučić, on the sale of land in Vojvodina, the strength of the "defense" mostly stood in front of the president's brother, and much less in front of Anna's. Even Ana herself defended the suffering president and his brother more than her family when she was a guest on TV stations.
So what did Igor, a forty-six-year-old member of Asek's board and the company's leader in Serbia, do wrong?
From the moment when Marinika Tepić brought the story to life about two weeks ago, deepened with a few juicy and juicy details, the discussion about whether it is okay for the company run by the prime minister's brother to rake in money at the expense of taxpayers has been almost non-stop. The story has two basic levels: the first, how to digitize the work of public administration at all levels so that it really brings significant savings in work and especially improvement of service to citizens, and the second level is a story about a classic conflict of interests - a sister arranged a job for a brother.
Did it really happen like that and how is it even possible that that particular company was chosen and coincided with Igor advancing in the company when his sister entered the government?
SEWAGE AND DIGITALIZATION
Aseko is an international company, founded in Poland, and until 2016, Igor Brnabić was the head of sales in the Serbian unit (according to his Linkedin profile). Before that, he also worked in similar jobs: some sales, some management and everything in the field of software technologies and solutions. The software industry is the fastest growing industry in Serbia and, as is often said, it brings in more money than raspberry growers.
Now, there is no confirmation that Igor Brnabić, like his sister, is some kind of local Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but it seems that they are a far more advanced version of Slobodan Kvrgić and Slavisa Kokeza, the duo that in the first few years of the progressive government was considered dominant " "digital" couple in Serbia and the team that together with the company Prointer collected millions only in business with the state. It has long been forgotten because this government has been in power for a long time, but long before the public even heard about Ana Brnabić and her great ideas about digital Serbia, the above-mentioned duo found a way to collect millions in the procurement, sales and implementation of hardware and software. .
And, as it usually happens, these are lucrative deals with rich and large public companies, which suddenly realize that they need new software solutions to optimize their production processes, to increase work efficiency and lead to higher productivity in a better way. The transition to digital platforms is a long journey because it is not only a question of buying equipment - although that was often the case - or installing a platform on which everything is done, but also of training the people who need to use it all. , and all under the pretext of more meticulous recording of everything and facilitating the work of those employed in the public sector.
It was believed, for example, that the introduction of a unified healthcare IZIS system would reduce crowding in waiting rooms and shorten waiting lists, that it would make it easier for doctors and that it would enable patients to move more easily through the different levels of the healthcare system. However, it is somehow more difficult, and apart from the fact that we have chipped health records and that pharmacies know who brings them a prescription, no major changes have been seen due to this part of e-administration.
Since 2016, when Ana Brnabić entered the Government of Serbia as a non-partisan expert, and especially since 2017, when she became the Prime Minister of the Government of Serbia, the topic of digitization has gained momentum and it seems that it is one of the main agendas in her program. She dedicated a significant part of her "exposition" presented in the National Assembly to that topic, and quite a number of people in Serbia were shocked and ridiculed the idea ("We don't have sewage, but we will have digitalization"). Three years later, certain changes can be seen, which admittedly did not help the citizens to live easier and to spend less time in queues in order to off line did what they were told they would be able to do "over the internet".
Not that Serbia has not become the Balkan Estonia - in which the level of public administration has really been raised to the level of e-administration - but, it seems, more than ever, what exists in various databases is also being hidden from citizens: for example, how much money is paid out from the treasury (state money) to different companies that the state and public companies use as suppliers of various services. For example, in neighboring Croatia, such a query is solved with two clicks, and here you need to write to the Treasury Department and it is certain that they will not answer your query (this is from personal experience).
Despite this shortcoming (not to mention the latest scandal with the Covid-19 Information Base and statistics related to the pandemic), hard-working people sat down, reviewed the financial reports, and it turned out that Brnabić's company recorded a significant increase in turnover from year to year (in 2019. over 43 million euros) while having significant deals with various state institutions. In addition, in their favor, they also receive tenders from the World Bank, which also has a significant portfolio dedicated to the digitization of Serbia. The fact that the turnover is growing and that the part that concerns business with the state is also growing, has led to the suspicion that this is a conflict of interest, thus entering the second part of the saga about the invisible man, Igor Brnabić.
Did he persuade his sister to help him get jobs, or did she make deals with Asek herself because her brother is the boss there, or did none of that happen, but they applied and got jobs? All this could be established very simply by the Agency for the fight against corruption, whose mandate is to investigate conflicts of interest, but also by the specialized prosecutor's offices for the fight against corruption, which can easily see how the deals were concluded, who exactly participated in it, who made decisions, did Ana Brnabić say somewhere that the job was given to Asek, and so on, in order, as already described in the rules of work of investigative bodies.
PAYMENT TERMINALS
What neither the Agency nor the prosecution can confirm with certainty is whether the brother and sister once sat like that in the cottage in Brestovik and arranged all the affairs. This is precisely why those in power should avoid such situations because, of course, no one can take anyone's word for it, and when it happens that it is discovered that the prime minister provided a lucrative job for her brother's company, it is a textbook example. conflict of interest, and the smallest thing is the resignation of a state official, that is, Ana Brnabić.
However, not only did she not resign, but she probably never thought she should. On the contrary, Ana Brnabić characterized everything as another attack on the family by the opposition, which coincided with the "attack" on the family of Aleksandar Vučić. Her attitude in this communication crisis earned her additional points with Vučić, and he once again appointed her as the Prime Minister of Serbia, on October 5, 2020, with the acclamation of all members of the SNS presidency, as announced by that party.
It goes without saying that no institution responded to the allegations of Marinika Tepić and the media, just like the allegations of the "Kurir" tabloid from August 2017 when this topic was "reported" in detail at the beginning of her mandate, and it seems that they will not soon . The crime of "conflict of interest" is not recognized in the Serbian penal system, nor in the political system, where it should lead to the end or suspension of a career. Somehow they are closer to the folk saying "he who is not for himself, is not for others", or "who wants what if not his own". It's as if citizens are being told that it doesn't matter who does the work if the work is done. But, even if it were so, the citizens have not seen any charm from the general story about digital Serbia. An ordinary citizen is still worried when he goes to an institution to get some service because there is always one more piece of paper missing, and journalists are denied a lot of information even though, allegedly, the entire administration works on digital platforms and all data is stored on one of the servers.
Where is Igor Brnabić in all of this, who in his only public appearance on TV N1 back in 2016 said that digitization is necessary, that real e-government is imperative and that the state needs to buy the right software to connect the various existing databases data. In the winter of 2016, months before his sister entered the government, Brnabić announced in the Info Biz program what would be one of the main topics of his sister Ana's government.
It was as if they talked a lot about it in their free time on the plot in Brestovik and as if they had some joint plans on how to achieve it even in the age when Ana was far from the digital world, focused on large wind farm construction projects in Banat; as if brother Igor had a vision that fortunately Ana took to implement when she came into a position to make decisions and to choose at least one department for her cabinet, namely the ICT department, in which she will make decisions herself and will not have to for every a little thing to ask the "boss".
This now sounds good for a possible explanation of her so much "push" to strengthen e-governance, which led to the fact that two weeks ago her head of the ICT office declared that there are over two million citizens in Serbia without a unique identity number. So how did they apply for the "100 euros to every adult citizen" measure, or who sold them bad software that threw out such data? Until those answers are received, it is worth looking at the payment terminals in stores - almost all of them bear the sign of the company led by Igor Brnabić. Just to know who it is.
