Milan Miličević, the mayor of Teslić and acting president of the Serb Democratic Party (SDS), and his wife Željka own a weekend cottage with 11 acres of land, a house, and commercial spaces totaling 130 square meters in Teslić. In the same town, they also have a 52-square-meter apartment. They also have a 49-square-meter apartment in Banja Luka. In their 2020 Asset Declaration, he reported savings of 116,400 BAM.
Miličević told CIN reporters that most of these properties they acquired through purchase or inherited from their parents before he actively engaged in politics. He declined to comment on their current savings, stating that they have some funds for rainy days. “I won’t say anything about that. I have what I thought I needed to have, and I don’t have much because I invested a lot in buying all of this and construction.”
He entered politics in 2008 after working as a doctor for nearly two decades. In the local elections held that year, as the holder of the SDS electoral list for the Teslić Municipal Assembly, he won a four-year term in the Municipal Council. In the following local elections, he ran for mayor and was elected as the chief of Teslić Municipality for the first time. He repeated this success in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
However, during his second mayoral term in 2019, the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) called for his removal.
“It was voted because I lost the parliamentary majority, just like in Bijeljina (…) I worked without a majority for almost three years, and then they voted for a recall referendum, which I won by over 4,000 votes and continued my term until the end,” he said.
In the same year, the District Public Prosecutor’s Office in Doboj filed charges against Miličević for abuse of office and power. The prosecution accused him of allowing Prijedorputevi a.d. to benefit during a public procurement process for the expansion of the water supply network in February 2015 when he failed to activate a 60,000 BAM bank guarantee after the company withdrew from the job for which it was selected. However, the Teslić Municipal Court acquitted Miličević of all charges by a first-instance judgment in 2022.
“There was no evidence of any abuse of office. I think the prosecutor appealed after that, and it should go to another level, but we don’t have information about it,” said Miličević, adding that the local SNSD Municipal Committee filed this and several other criminal complaints against him.
Miličević was born in Zenica and initially intended to stay and work in his hometown after graduating in 1988 from the Medical School in Belgrade. However, he couldn’t find a job for almost a year due to an oversupply of medical personnel, and he ended up in Teslić by chance. He applied for jobs everywhere, and the only call he received was from the municipality where he would become the mayor 23 years later.
“I came to Teslić at the end of 1989 for an interview, and I immediately got a job at a local rural health center called ‘Zdravstvena stanica Blatnica’,” Miličević recalled.
After a year, he started working at the Sveti Sava Health Center in Teslić as a medical doctor. He was in this position when the war broke out, and was mobilized into the Army of Republika Srpska. From 1992 and for the next four years, he worked as a field doctor in the area of responsibility above Teslić.
After the war, he pursued a specialization in neurology, which he completed in 2000 at the Medical School in Banja Luka. During his specialization, he worked weekends as a DJ on the Džungla Radio Station. “It was a hobby of mine; I enjoyed doing it, but of course, I was also paid for the job,” he mentioned.
After completing his specialization, he returned to the Sveti Sava Health Center in Teslić, where he worked as a neurology specialist until 2004. He then moved to the Mental Health Center, where he became the head. From 2005 to 2012, he worked as a family medicine doctor and later as the assistant director of the Health Center.
Miličević has been a member of the SDS since 1992. He became the president of the Main Board in 2015, and in November 2022, he became the acting president of the Party.
His asset profile is part of CIN’s “Politicians’ Assets” database. This database is the most comprehensive source of information about the income, movable, and immovable assets of over 220 officials and politicians from both ruling and opposition parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It includes information about their education, professional and political careers, savings, loans, and their ownership stakes in companies. It also provides information about lawsuits and court judgments against politicians and officials.
