Montenegro’s Court of Appeal on 16 September upheld a ruling requiring the Municipality of Kolašin to pay Podgorica-based Montplan at least 152,022 euros for additional urban planning and design work. The May ruling by the Commercial Court requires further statutory interest on the principal and calculated interest from 26 October 2020 until payment, according to the appeal court’s decision.
The award comprises about 65,789 euros in principal, 53,673 euros in calculated interest and 32,560 euros in legal costs. Interest and costs together total about 86,233 euros, more than the principal, while the additional statutory interest continues to accrue on the principal and calculated interest.
Vuk Vuković, secretary of the Municipality of Kolašin, said the municipality intends to challenge the decision before the Supreme Court of Montenegro. It has hired a lawyer to prepare and file a revision, Vuković said, because it currently has no appointed protector of property and legal interests. The decisions do not establish whether the municipality has paid the amount in the meantime.
Dispute over work beyond the original contract
The case concerns urban plans and development projects Montplan prepared for the municipality, including services carried out nearly two decades ago and some from an earlier period. A contract awarded after a tender in April 2007 covered amendments to Kolašin’s General Urban Plan and the Detailed Urban Plan for the Centre district. The initial price of 48,000 euros rose to 68,796 euros under an amendment dated April 2009.
Montplan said the area covered by the General Urban Plan increased from 1,150 to about 1,787 hectares. The Detailed Urban Plan expanded from 76 to 107 hectares, including the Braće Vujisić settlement, the company said. Its new lawsuit sought payment for other work, which it argued was not covered by the earlier contract or amounts already paid.
The municipality argued that the expanded scope was already covered by the amendment and that Montplan had not proved additional obligations. It also objected that the parties had not agreed on either the scope or price of the extra work. Montplan maintained that written contracts were not required for these services, while Kolašin disputed the way the work had allegedly been commissioned.
Montplan’s legal representative, Miodrag Maraš, said the plans were adopted on 29 December 2008 with ten amendments, and that incorporating them effectively required the Detailed Urban Plan for the Centre to be redone. He said the municipality’s president requested changes and the president of the Municipal Assembly made payment conditional on their inclusion. Maraš also said Montplan reprinted the complete plans after earlier copies went missing, then printed them again in connection with a criminal complaint against municipal officials.
The company attributed the lack of receipts for some documents to its trust in the municipality’s president, saying correspondence was delivered to him personally for signature without written proof of handover. Kolašin described the alleged arrangement as an oral agreement in the president’s office. Montplan also said non-payment forced it to take out a 60,000-euro loan, on which it paid 16,500 euros in interest.
The Court of Appeal accepted that the new claim involved additional services not included in amounts previously awarded or paid. The first-instance court found the additional engagement was not undertaken unilaterally, citing expert reports, municipal documents from 2009 and 2010, and testimony from a former municipality president. It concluded that local officials knew about and accepted the services.
Courts assess evidence and earlier payments
The extra work included mapping utility networks, preparing geodetic base maps, aligning planning zones, scanning maps, and repeatedly printing and binding documents. Although the municipality was supposed to provide source materials, the court found it had not supplied them in the required scope and that Montplan obtained and processed them. The Commercial Court said the disputed work was additional professional and technical work, not work covered by the agreed fee.
The court also accepted claims for work completed before the 2007 contract because the work was used for plans adopted later. Expert Vesna Doderović valued documentation for town squares and adjoining streets at 29,876 euros, the market at 6,804 euros and stadium changing rooms at 2,943 euros. Her visual inspection found that conditions at those locations matched the relevant projects.
A later reconciled calculation listed separate claims of about 3,291 euros for the squares and streets, 1,500 euros for the market and 855 euros for the changing rooms. For two bus-station options, Doderović initially could not determine who had commissioned them or whether they were additional work because the file contained no contract. A supplementary assessment valued the two options at a total of 7,699 euros, while the later reconciled calculation listed amounts of 3,000 euros and 5,000 euros.
The court rejected the municipality’s argument that it was not the client for the bus-station work, relying on expert evidence, official documents and the parties’ overall business relationship. The ruling said the existing bus-station building was not the same as the design, but had a similar facade. The claim also included about 5,245 euros for two items covering the printing and packaging of plans, based on invoices from 2005 and 2006; Kolašin disputed whether those invoices had been properly delivered and recorded.
The municipality said it had paid Montplan 89,646 euros, or 20,850 euros more than the contract fee. Financial expert Darko Peković confirmed that the contract and amendment had been settled but could not link the difference in payments to the new claim. He cited discrepancies between the descriptions of the claimed items, accounting entries and payment purposes. The court accepted that the payments had been made but found they did not prove that services in the new lawsuit had been paid for.
Kolašin also challenged how documents for the expert assessment had been obtained, saying material was handed to the expert by a woman who was probably from a technical background. Montplan said the assessment used documents from both parties’ case files and included an inspection of the sites. The court described the reconciled report as professional, clear, logical and based on professional standards. The appeal court said the issue was not only whether a written contract existed, but also whether the municipality had accepted and used the work.
Interest calculations varied according to the dates used. Starting from the date of the reconciled report in June 2020, the financial expert calculated about 1,975 euros because the municipality had no formal invoices for individual items on file. A second calculation, using earlier due dates from the architectural experts’ reports, produced about 53,674 euros; the court awarded about 53,673 euros. The earlier calculation had excluded about 20,797 euros related to a separate dispute. Legal costs included 30 hearings held and 30 adjourned.
The dispute follows an earlier case over the planning work. In 2013, the Commercial Court in Bijelo Polje awarded Montplan 37,796 euros plus interest; the Court of Appeal upheld that decision, and the Supreme Court rejected the municipality’s revision in March 2014. The current claim concerns other work. Separately, the Detailed Urban Plan for the Centre has been involved in disputes over building height and floor area in urban and technical conditions, with investors obtaining different opinions from Montplan.
