Interviews in Early September: Independent Board Should Check Whether SIPA Director Candidates Meet Pension Requirements

(Patria) - The Independent Board of the BiH Parliamentary Assembly should schedule interviews in early September with candidates who applied for the position of Director of the State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA), while Darko Ćulum's mandate expired in mid-July. However, according to the law, he remains in office until a new director is appointed.

One of the applicants is Ćulum himself.

Verifications of the applicants are underway, and the Independent Board has requested data from criminal records to check if they have been convicted. However, in addition to this, an extract from the PIO/MIO records should also be checked for these candidates, i.e., whether they meet the conditions for a pension.

Once the Independent Board receives the requested data, a date for the interviews will be set, after which a ranking list of five successful candidates will be compiled and submitted to the Minister of Security of BiH, Nenad Nešić, who proposes one candidate to the Council of Ministers of BiH for the position of SIPA Director.

The check of PIO/MIO records is necessary to avoid a repeat of the situation with the fugitive Deputy Director of SIPA, Zoran Galić. He was appointed to this position in February 2023, and due to the situation he found himself in while fleeing criminal proceedings, he requested dismissal from the Council of Ministers of BiH because he had met the conditions for a pension. However, the Independent Board should have taken this into account during the earlier competition as well.

As Patria previously reported, the two most serious candidates for the SIPA Director mandate are Ćulum and the Chief of the Doboj Police Administration of the Ministry of Interior of Republika Srpska, Slobodan Radinković.

Unofficially, certain structures from Serbia are also involved in lobbying for the SIPA Director position, given the importance of this police agency in breaking up organized crime and drug trafficking chains, whose members are often Serbian nationals.