Land swap case involving BD Agro - High-level corruption cases in the Western Balkans and Turkey

On 30 December 2015, Serbian authorities arrested eight suspects for illegally swapping agricultural land belonging to BD Agro, as part of mass arrests in an anti-corruption action known as Operation Rezač (“Operation Shredder”).

The Prosecutor's Office for Organised Crime launched an investigation against Zoran Jeličić, former director of the Agricultural Land Administration, Djuro Obradović, majority owner of BD Agro, BD Agro CEO Ljubiša Jovanović, Nikola Jakšić of the Agricultural Land Administration, and four members of the land swap committee: Tomislav Pavlović, Boban Golubović, Zoran Jovanović and Dragan Tufegdžić.

The suspects were charged with abuse of office and abuse of official position for illegally exchanging agricultural land between 14 August 2008 and 26 March 2010. Under a January 2010 land exchange agreement with the Ministry of Agriculture, BD Agro of Dobanovci swapped over 46 hectares of land with the state. However, according to the investigation, the land swap partly involved land that had been nationalised in post-WWII agricultural reforms, was subject to restitution and already returned to its original owners, independent farmers. As a result, the state budget suffered damages of almost RSD1 billion.

The prosecution argued that BD Agro CEO Jovanović and BD Agro owner Obradović were aware of the situation when BD Agro exchanged the land for land owned by the state, effectively giving land to Serbia that BD Agro did not own and receiving other land parcels in exchange.

Jovanović and Obradović submitted a supplement to the land swap request to Nikola Jakšić, an employee of the Agricultural Land Administration, who had already initiated the procedure. Jakšić accepted the request even though he knew that the land offered by BD Agro had already been returned to the farmers by the commission on land restitution in the Belgrade municipality of Zemun.

Jakšić’s order set up a land swap committee that consisted of Pavlović, Golubović, Jovanović and Tufegdžić. The committee members signed the documents to approve the exchange. They did so even though they did not obtain the required evidence indicating that the municipal land restitution commission had completed the restitution process. Based on the land swap committee’s position, the director of the Agricultural Land Administratio