September 30, 2024
Speaking at the trial of journalists of the Balkan Investigative Reporting network (BIRN) over an article about the villa of Belgrade Mayor Aleksandar Šapić in Trieste, Šapić dubbed BIRN’s journalists “notorious and pathological liars”.
Throughout the duration of the trial, the mayor addressed the BIRN journalists with irony or insults, occasionally raising his voice and interrupting them nervously and arrogantly.
Šapić first stated that BIRN is an irrelevant media outlet, but that their investigation into his villa was reported by “all possible media”, which created a scandal.
That’s what prompted him to seek six million dinars (approx. 50,000 euros) from BIRN’s publishers, editors and journalists in compensation for mental anguish and defamation.
The mayor claims that, in their investigative article about his property in Trieste, the journalists falsely accused him of breaking the law and not reporting his villa in this Italian city to the Agency for the Prevention of Corruption.
The journalists provided an explanation of how they worked on this story and made detailed checks of all the facts included. They stressed that they made multiple unsuccessful attempts to contact Šapić prior to publishing the article, while the Agency for the Prevention of Corruption also failed to respond to the question of whether he registered his property in Trieste.
