The Siniša Mali plagiarism scandal was a political scandal in Serbia which led to the University of Belgrade annulling the 2013 dissertation of economist and politician Siniša Mali in 2019. The process of establishing the initial claims took over five years, during which Mali progressed from the mayoralty of Belgrade to becoming the finance minister in the Serbian government, joining the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). After this scandal, Mali enrolled in doctoral studies at the Technical University of Košice, where he studied finance. In June 2023, he defended his PhD thesis whose objective was to study the existence and characteristics of the flypaper effect in Serbia.
The question of Mali's annulled dissertation grew from an academic matter to a political affair due to the negligence of the state and academic institutions, leading to which in turn public protests, a student blockade of the university and a serious partisan divide among the public.
Because of his personal connections with Aleksandar Vučić, his brother Andrej Vučić and Ana Brnabić, Mali was defended by the government and his party in what was described as an operation to "defend and protect plagiarism" with the whole "[political] machinery employed to defend the doctorate". The controversy triggered protests and public performances calling for the doctorate to be annulled, which ultimately blended into the wider civil and political Serbian protests since 2018. This was enhanced by the perception of his mayoralty of Belgrade, which was described as the "affair of all affairs". while Mali himself was labeled "controversial" and "scandal-ridden".
Due to the scandal, Mali was never officially awarded a doctorate, but government media still referred to him as holding it and he wrote his occupation as "Doctor of Philosophy" in the 2018 electoral list in Belgrade.Electoral list for the coalition Aleksandar Vučić – zato što volimo Beograd On 12 December 2019, the Senate of the Belgrade University unanimously annulled his doctorate due to plagiarism. Ten days later, Mali removed his degree information from his biography on the Ministry of Finance website, but he refused to step down and called the annulment a political decision.
The case has been unfavorably compared to the Guttenberg plagiarism scandal, particularly given that Mali's case took 6 years to be resolved. The faculty and university were labeled "shameful" and the whole process was called a "mawkish saga" ultimately resolved due to the persistence of students and professors alike. The academia's fear of confronting politicians, government pressure on FON and the obedience and corruption of the country's intellectuals were blamed for the case.
The doctorate of Mali was one in a series of regarding dubious academic qualifications, mostly those held by politician. Mali's doctorate was the first to be annulled by the university itself On 11 March 2015, the European Parliament expressed concerns that neither academia nor political institutions were properly dealing with plagiarism. In 2018, the National Entity for Accreditation and Quality Assurance in Higher Education of Serbia (NAT) was reduced to an associate member of the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education.
The scandal was noted as occurring alongside an exponential swell in the number of awarded doctorates in Serbia. In a 100 year span from 1905 (the beginning of awarded doctorates in Serbia) to 2005, 16,860 doctorates were awarded. In the next 8 years, from 2006 to 2013, there were 9,000, with an added 15,000 doctoral students. The number of students per capita in Serbia is below the European average, but it was noted that the number of doctoral students is well above the average, with one mentor having up to 15 students. In a 2014 survey, 65% of the faculties reported having no plagiarism procedure and only some of the remaining 35% could eplain their existing procedure.
Doctorate
Mentored by professor Dragan Đuričin, Siniša Mali in 2002 originally submitted his thesis at the faculty where he studied, the Faculty of Economics (EKOF). The title of the thesis was Privatization by the Method of Enterprises Selling - Theoretical Concepts and the Case of Serbia. After 9 years, the report on the work wasn't adopted by the EKOF in 2011, and Mali's public defense of the dissertation was refused. The faculty rejected his submission, concluding the work is of low quality and without scientific value.
Mali then modified it and submitted it to the University of Belgrade's Faculty of Organizational Sciences (FON) under the title Value Creation through the Process of Restructuring and Privatisation – Theoretical Concepts and the Case of Serbia. There he obtained his PhD in 2013.Tezu Siniše Malog odbio Ekonomski fakultet, pa ju je odbranio na FON-u The commission included professors Ondrej Jaško (new mentor), Slađana Barjaktarović Rakočević and Đuričin.
Switching of the faculties later became part of the controversy. Professor Đuričin, one of the members of the commission which accepted Mali's thesis at the FON, actually claimed that Mali wrote two doctorates, the one rejected at the FE, and one accepted by the FON. Submitting one the same thesis at two faculties is forbidden and the Faculty of Economics never published Mali's original thesis nor the reasons why it was rejected, so it remains unclear if these were different theses. Mali stated that he wrote the thesis for 3 years, which would mean that he concurrently wrote two theses. Dean of the FON at the time of Mali's defense of the thesis, professor Milan Martić, confirmed that Mali's doctoral dissertation was rejected at the FE, after which he has published his dissertation at the FON. He also stated that 50% of the dissertation was different from the first one, but the original dissertation remained unpublished.
Initial plagiarism reports
On 9 July 2014 the website "Peščanik" claimed that Mali had plagiarized at least one third of his PhD thesis. Raša Karapandža, finance professor at the EBS University of Business and Law in Wiesbaden, Germany, and visiting scholar at the New York University and the University of California, Berkeley, showed that Mali plagiarized the thesis with the content from other theses, authored articles, site of the Agency of Privatization of Serbia and Wikipedia by publishing several examples. Karapandža claimed at the time that Mali plagiarized at least 33% of the thesis, publishing data which confirmed some 18%. At that time, Mali said he "is firmly standing behind his work".
In September 2014, German publisher De Gruyter announced that the article published in their journal, one of two which qualified Mali for the title, contains uncited paragraphs from the doctoral dissertation of Stifanos Hailemariam, a professor and economist from Eritrea, titled Corporate Value Creation, Governance and Privatisation: Restructuring and Managing Enterprises in Transition – The Case of Eritrea, defended at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands, in 2001. On 20 January 2015, Simon Cifert, editor-in-chief of the journal "Organization and Management" which published the scientific work of Siniša Mali, retracted Mali's text from the journal. After revision of the text submitted by the lead co-author, the editorial board of the journal republished the above-mentioned study, with an introductory note Corrigendum, citing another source from the literature used in the design of the study, which was claimed by the co-author to be a technical mistake in the previous version. 13 citations of Hailemariam were added, unlike the previous work which had no quotes by him at all.
A group of the FON alumni sent an open letter to dean Martić, claiming a blatant conflict of interest. One of the co-authors of the retracted article was Slađana Barjaktarović Rakočević. The article later became part of the thesis, while she became a member of the commission when Mali defended it. Additionally, the other article which quialified Mali to submit his thesis, Privatization Through the Sale of Equity – Conceptual Framework and Archived Results in Serbia, was published in February 2013 in magazine Ekonomika preduzeća, whose editor is Dragan Đuričin, Mali's original mentor and another defending commission member.
Group of authors, joined by the association "Save the science" ("Spasimo nauku") pointed out that even if two published works were non-plagiarized and legitimate, they wouldn't be acceptable for the doctorate defense. Code on Accreditation of the Study Programs stipulates that, in order to be accepted for the doctoral theses, work must be published in magazines listed at SCIndeks, Serbian version of citation analysis. Neither of Mali's articles was published in such magazines.
First faculty commission
Prompted by Karapandža's report, the FON formed a commission to investigate Mali's doctorate. All three members of the commission were the same as the original thesis defending commission (Jaško, Barjaktarović Rakočević, Đuričin). In October 2014, this commission gave positive opinion on the thesis. They claimed that the process neither stipulated, nor it was possible, to use specialized software for discovering plagiarism and that media reports regarding the issue are not credible. The commission did state that certain parts regarding the literature listing were incorporated without quoting, which doesn't affect the doctorate's scientific contribution. In media, the findings of the commission were simply titled the Mentor's Report. The Scientific-Teaching Council (NNV) of the faculty accepted this report on 20 November 2014. Out of 154 members (NNV is made of professors and assistants), 118 were present: 117 yes, 1 abstained.
On 10 December 2014, the Legal-Economic Sciences Council of the Belgrade University rejected this report, as out of 23 members, 11 voted to accept it. Some, including the "Save the Science" movement, took this as the official recognition of the plagiarism, calling for the university to annul Mali's doctorate immediately.
Rector of the Belgrade University, , on 10 June 2015 asked the Legal-Economic Sciences Council to re-examine the case after the retracted article by De Gruyter was reposted with added references. The council refused to do so, waiting for the university's new code regarding the plagiarism process and ethical codes. Though announced for the end of 2015, they were adopted only in July 2016. The process was then returned to the FON, to start the new procedure.
Second faculty commission
In November 2016 the FON formed new Ethics Commission which included Milica Bulajić, Mladen Čudanov, Srđa Bjeladinović, Veroljub Nastić and Miloš Krstanović. On 19 December 2016 the commission rejected plagiarism report as unsubstantiated, concluded that citing omissions are negligible, that software checks can't be the basis for the proceedings and that it can not be challenged on the original scientific contribution of the doctoral dissertation as the scientific contribution is undisputable.
Professor Karapandža called the report meaningless, as the commission didn't try to dispute the plagiarism regarding the translation from English to Serbian, as checking software can't do that so it has to be done "by hand". He also said that, given the amount of copied/translated text, it can't be just citing omission. Dušan Teodorović, a member of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts and president of the Academy Board for Higher Education sent 20 pages of evidence which he alleged prove the work is a plagiarism to the rector of the university asking for Mali's PhD to be annulled. On 18 January 2017, citing procedural reasons, the Senate of the University of Belgrade rejected the Ethics Commission findings, instructing the faculty to form an Experts Commission instead, as it should have done in the first place by the university's rule book.
Third faculty commission