Belgrade Mayor plagiarizes doctorate

A new plagiarism scandal has erupted in Serbian politics. The scandal around the dissertation of the Minister of the Interior, Nebojša Stefanović, is still in full swing. Now the dissertation of the Mayor of Belgrade, Sinisa Mali, entitled “Creating Value Through the Process of Restructuring and Privatization – Theoretical Concepts and Experiences of Serbia” and submitted in 2013 to the University of Belgrade’s Faculty of Organizational Sciences has been documented to be heavily plagiarized.

Raša Karapandža, Professor of finance at the European Business School in Wiesbaden, Germany, documented the plagiarism in English on the Serbian site Peščanik in early July.

Karapandža has put together an interactive graphical representation of the thesis with every page of Mali's thesis linked to the iThenticate report on the plagiarism found on that page. Even considering all the caveats about the use of plagiarism detection software, quite a number of sources, including the Wikipedia, have been identified. Karapandža calls on Mali to step down from office, quoting the petition sent to German chancellor Merkel when the plagiarism was found in the dissertation of the German Minister of Defense, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg:

If the protection of ideas is no longer important in our society, then we will gamble our future away.