KTRKO 533/23 response and the emails of 15–21 November 2023

Provenance and sequence

On 15 November 2023 at 10:45, the author sent a submission to the Special Department for the Suppression of Corruption of the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Novi Sad. At 10:47, he corrected a poorly machine-translated passage and supplied his original Croatian text. The times come from the email headers, GMT+1. The Prosecutor’s Office issued response KTRKO 533/23 dated 20 November 2023. The letter was sent to the author’s address by email on 21 November 2023 at 14:35 GMT+1; the time at which the author read it has not been established.

This reading edition includes the entire introduction to the 10:45 email. It replaces that email’s faulty and duplicated machine-translated passage with the complete explicit correction sent by the author at 10:47. Both author passages are translated from the supplied text; the standalone numbers 6 and 7 are retained. The Prosecutor’s Office’s reply is separately translated from its original Serbian letter.

Original documents

15 November 2023, 10:45 GMT+1 — introduction to the author’s submission

Author: Milan Petrovic. Recipient: [email protected]. The following is the complete translated introduction to the first email.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I have proceedings pending before the Higher Court in Novi Sad for the establishment of paternity, as the child, because under the law I am entitled to an unlimited period.
I am the victim of two illegal adoptions by the Centre for Social Work in Novi Sad. The first was carried out to take away my inheritance after my late father Pavle Lakatoš, who died on 7 November 1978 and with whom I had lived in Bački Vinogradi until then. I was given for illegal adoption on 21 June 1979, only seven days before my fifth birthday, because after that age full adoption was no longer possible under the law then in force. The first illegal adopters were from Budisava. They had their first interview with the social worker on 12 June 1979, with the pedagogue on 18 June 1979 and with the psychologist on 19 June 1979, and the adoption decision was made on 21 June 1979: exactly nine (NINE) days, a record in its own right! I was given for illegal adoption again in September 1984. The law was clearly violated there, because under the law an adopted child cannot be adopted again.
I was born as Miletić Milivoj to my mother Cvita Miletić and my father Pavle Lakatoš, outside marriage. My father acknowledged me before the court during his divorce from his first wife. I do not know whether that information was entered in the civil registers and later deleted, because I was not allowed to inspect that register at the registry office. An arrogant person there, whose only name I know is Rajka, addressed me rudely.
After my father's death I was among the heirs. While those proceedings were ongoing, I was removed through illegal adoption and my first name and surname were changed to Milan Vasić, which is not normal practice with a five-year-old child. The participants in that illegal act were the social worker Vera Radovanović, who, as far as I know, is deceased, and Anđa Gamber, the Centre's lawyer, who is now retired.
I was illegally adopted again in September 1984, with those two persons again involved. And what is the height of audacity: they use the first adopter's statement consenting to my further adoption as the statement of a biological parent, which is a shocking violation of the law. There I become Milan Petrović.

According to some information I have, my case is one of 78 cases involving the Centre for Social Work in Novi Sad. The last person who concealed all those records from me was the Centre's lawyer Milica Ljubičić. I uncovered everything through my own investigation.

Since I need all the relevant records for the court proceedings and have heard unofficially that the Centre is under investigation, I need material to supplement my claim and to have the first illegal adoption annulled as a criminal act of the Centre and its employees who participated in all of this.

How can a child who is among the heirs be removed by adoption while the probate proceedings are ongoing?

Let me present some of my thoughts:

15 November 2023, 10:47 GMT+1 — the author’s translation correction

The following is the author’s own explanation, followed by a complete English translation of his original Croatian text. The statements and characterizations in this section are the author’s words from 2023.

Because my thoughts were originally in Croatian and the software translated them badly, I am therefore providing them in their original form:

IN THE 1976 LAW OF THE SAP VOJVODINA, ARTICLE 2 STATES: — Adoption may be established only if it is in the child's interests. The child's interests were violated: — Adoption was a loophole in the law used to take away the child's inheritance and prevent the child from knowing his biological origins, so that when he grew up he would not seek his legal rights. The Centre for Social Work wholeheartedly participates in this and to this day conceals the truth from that child, who is now an adult and has every legal right to know everything about his origins and how he came under the Centre's authority. — The adaptation measure that the Centre for Social Work was required to carry out was not implemented; instead, the child was assigned a guardian for one day (20–21 June 1979), in
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the person of the social worker Vera Radovanović, and then the adoption was declared. It was declared on 21 June 1979, only seven days before the child turned five — 28 June 1979 — because after that date only incomplete adoption was possible, in which the child's biological ties and therefore his inheritance rights were not severed under the SAPV Adoption Law of 1976 then in force. — The adopters were not equal to that role, because shortly after adopting the child they developed marital problems that they dealt with through quarrels and fighting with one another and with the child. The cause was marital infidelity: the adopter acted in a very brazen manner, bringing his mistress into the house in front of his wife and the adopted child. He beat them both, and the beaten woman, according to the child's recollection, once attacked that mistress with a knife. The mistress was a female neighbour, then married, with two children aged 18 and 12. The adoptive mother died as a result of the beatings; meanwhile, the unfaithful husband and the mistress fled to Sremska Kamenica out of fear of the mistress's husband, who found out too late. Besides the breast cancer that she developed from the beatings and from which she later died, the adoptive mother also manifested psychological problems: on one occasion she chased the adopted child around a table with a knife. On another occasion she caught a cat that had entered the house, tied it by its tail, hung it from a tree and brutally beat it with a stick. The child ran into the house when he saw that scene. Later, the adoptive mother, an otherwise seriously mentally ill woman, said that she had cut off the cat's head with an axe on a chopping block. She called another female neighbour to see it, but according to her account the cat, together with its head, had disappeared. She also regularly visited folk healers, and a few months before her death she enrolled herself and the child with Jehovah's Witnesses. All of the above gives grounds to suspect that the Centre for Social Work did not conduct any checks on the adopters, or declared them suitable merely as a formality, because they clearly were not. The child was most likely meant to save their marriage, which had been unstable even before the adoption. No one paid attention to that, because other interests were clearly at stake rather than the best interests of the child who was about to turn five, after which full adoption would soon no longer be possible and the child would retain his biological rights. So someone willing to take him for adoption was sought in haste. The female appellant in the probate proceedings states that the adopters renounce the child's inheritance rights on his behalf. Thus, besides destroying his childhood, they brazenly renounced his biological rights, leaving him nothing but trauma. This raises
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the question: where did the appellant get the records, how did she obtain them from the Centre for Social Work, and with whom is that Centre unlawfully cooperating and sharing confidential records? The law provides that only when the child reaches a certain age does he have the right to such access; as stated above, even as an adult he was denied access after several attempts. The second adoption is itself illegal, as Article 7 of the law then in force states: several persons cannot adopt one person. They may do so only if they are spouses, but the first and second adopters have no such relationship with one another. The first adopters are presented to the second adopters as the biological parents, and the child as being of Serbian origin. This clearly implies that the earlier illegal act is being concealed by another illegal act: the issue is not the child's best interests but the cover-up of a criminal offence committed against that child. Throughout this time the child's mother does not know that her child has been given for adoption. The Centre's lawyer Gamber Anđa, not knowing what she is talking about, tells the now adult child in 2005, when asked about his mother: — Cvita came to ask for social assistance and said, “I have a son in a home.” On another occasion, the child's sister on his father's side, Roža, meets the mother, who attacks her with the words: — Because of you, my son is in a home! This makes it clear that the mother was lied to that the child was in a home for children without parental care — she came from modest circumstances and lacked the basic education to understand exactly what was happening — and that the child “does not want to see her”, while that child is suffering trauma through two illegal adoptions.

20 November 2023 — the Prosecutor’s Office’s KTRKO 533/23 response

The following is the complete translation of the Prosecutor’s Office’s letter, separately from the author’s emails. The letter is dated 20 November; the covering email through which it was sent appears in the section dated 21 November.

REPUBLIC OF SERBIA
HIGHER PUBLIC PROSECUTOR’S OFFICE IN NOVI SAD
Special Department for the Suppression of Corruption
NUMBER: KTRKO – 533/23
DATED: 20 November 2023
NOVI SAD
STB/MI

MILAN PETROVIĆ
[email protected]

We inform you that no criminal prosecution will be undertaken in connection with the submission that you delivered to this Public Prosecutor’s Office on 15 November 2023, because in this specific case it cannot be established that any person committed a criminal offence prosecuted ex officio for which this Public Prosecutor’s Office has subject-matter and territorial jurisdiction and for which the limitation period for criminal prosecution has not expired. I therefore consider that, in this specific matter entered in this Public Prosecutor’s Office’s “KTRKO” register, there are no grounds to initiate criminal proceedings in connection with the described criminal-law event.

This Public Prosecutor’s Office does not collect evidence for the purpose of supplying it to parties for civil proceedings before the Higher Court in Novi Sad.

PUBLIC PROSECUTOR
Gordana Rainović
[signature and stamp]

21 November 2023, 14:35 GMT+1 — email sending the Prosecutor’s Office’s letter

Sender: Posk Novi Sad, Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Novi Sad — [email protected].
Recipient: [email protected].
Subject: Letter KTRKO 533/2023.
Attachment as shown in the supplied printout: КТРКО 533-23 ДОПИС ОД 20.11.2023. ГОДИНЕ.pdf, 250.5 kB.

Dear Sir or Madam,

Attached to this email, we are sending you this Prosecutor’s Office’s letter, reference number KTRKO 533/2023, dated 20 November 2023.

Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Novi Sad
Special Department for the Suppression of Corruption

Later author’s clarification

The author later clarifies that his lawyer in Kragujevac at that time filed a claim against his sisters concerning inheritance. The author withdrew the claim and ended his cooperation with the lawyer because he was dissatisfied with the way the claim had been framed. This note records his present clarification about those proceedings; the original 2023 email, in which he described the proceedings as establishing paternity, is preserved above.