Oliver Dulić announced fight with corruption in civil engineering

(Oliver Dulić)

Minister of Environment Protection and Spatial Planning Oliver Dulić has announced elimination of corruption in civil engineering with the help of series of legal changes, some of which should be introduced by the end of the year.

- We recognized the problem of ownership over building land, inefficiency of building permit issuing system and corruption, which is in close connection with all that, as the main barriers to business in Serbia - said Dulić and promised that the Ministry he led would do everything to change that.

Dulić said that the Law on planning and construction would be changed and that restitution of building land with the built and unbuilt facilities would be defined by the end of the year.

According to his words, the intention of the state is to return that land to former owners or their heirs, and it will also be determined what should be done in case a facility owned by someone else is built on that land.

- New Law on planning and construction should "accelerate issuing of bulding permits" - said Dulić and added that the average time for issuing of the permit would be reduced from current 204 to 104 days.

- We will also finance designing of spatial plans in the municipalities that haven't designed them yet (65% of all municipalities in Serbia). Because of that, local urbanistic institutes interpret and design their own plans and issue bulding permits, which is a reason for a large-scale corruption at local level - said Dulić.

He pointed out that the designing of spatial plans for all municipalities and changes in the Law would reduce corruption related to issuing of building permits, which will significantly improve the situation in that field.

By the end of the year, as the Minister announced, the Law on estimate of influence on environment will also be changed to more precisely define the facilities that require mandatory estimate of influence on environment, while the procedure should be reduced from 270 to about 220 days.