Montenegrin Officials Using Legislative Gaps to Hide Value of Crypto Assets
With the end of three decades of uninterrupted rule by the Democratic Party of Socialists, DPS, in 2020, Spajic became finance minister that year and promised a raft of regulation that he said would turn the country into a “crypto paradise”.
In 2022, the government granted citizenship to Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain and a guru in crypto circles, while Spajic claimed that the cryptocurrency industry could grow to account for a third of national economic output by 2025.
In January 2021, BIRN reported that Spajic, then finance minister, had declared ownership of Bitcoin with a market value of 150,000 euros, without specifying how much Bitcoin he owned.
In his regular annual report submitted in March 2021,…
