He referred to the older Atlas Bank case, which has been arousing curiosity for a decade.
"I've seen enough of everything in my police career. There have been thefts of everything and anything, some of which were reported for the column, whether they believed it or not. If a kilogram of gold had been reported missing from the Atlas Bank, there would have been at least a written record of it, and I haven't seen that record anywhere," said this police officer.
According to him, it is not impossible that the gold disappeared earlier and was noticed late, and then no one dared to report it.
"Then bankruptcy was introduced, and for whoever might have stolen the gold, that came as a surprise. The traces disappeared, and now we can only guess. There are no written traces in the police about the report, there are no traces after the bankruptcy was introduced. And that's the end of it, it would be very difficult to investigate now," said the police source.
The RTCG portal previously wrote about how one of the former employees said that at the time of the bankruptcy, at least on paper, there was a kilogram of the purest dental gold in the vault of Atlas Banka in Berane.
This gold, as he explained, had been kept for several decades and belonged to the Health Fund since the time when gold was used as a material in dentistry.
"The key thing is that at the moment when bankruptcy was introduced and our branch was closed, a commission was not formed and the commission and minutes did not state that the gold was missing. It was left for safekeeping by a former director who left for Belgrade, and it was there for perhaps three decades before bankruptcy was introduced," said a former employee of the Berane branch of Atlas Bank.
He believes that a list of the property that was found must have been made at that time, and then they could say with certainty that the gold had possibly disappeared before that.
"On that day, April 5, 2019, without any notice, they waited for the end of working hours, and when we all left, without knowing anything, they simply locked the doors and posted security. Many of our personal belongings were left inside and we couldn't get them," claims the former bank employee.
The bankruptcy administration once announced on this occasion that at the time of the bankruptcy, there was nothing in the vaults, that is, that they were free, or as they put it, "freed from the contents."
Before joining the Atlas system, the bank in Berane was the forerunner of all banks in this region, and it kept all the documentation of all former commercial enterprises from the time of the SFRY.
The existing building was built in 1974 with funds from the city's economy, which at that time was the third largest in Montenegro. At that time, only this bank existed. After the war, that bank was called Komunalna banka Ivangrad, Andrijevica and Plav.
Then it changed its name to Osnovna banka, then to Montenegro banka. And in 1992 it separated from the Montenegro banka system and then Beranska banka was formed. Beranska banka was merged with Atlas banka in 2003.
The RTCG portal also contacted some of the older dentists who explained that dental gold is the most valuable material and that it had to be of the highest purity, namely twenty-four carats, or 97 percent purity. Today, it is extremely expensive and rarely used.
Only the oldest dentists still remember when, while dentistry belonged to public healthcare, the then Health Fund covered the costs of such services.
According to publicly available data, gold never completely ceased to be used in dentistry, but it was gradually replaced by cheaper and more accessible materials in the last decade of the last century, between 1990 and 2000. Technically, it still exists as an option, but very expensive.
The price of a kilogram of the purest gold on the world market is around 150 thousand euros, while on the black market the value is significantly higher. Despite this, there is no trace of the gold from the former Atlas Bank branch in Berane, and it seems that who and when "emptied the vault" will remain a mystery.
