NALED banquet: 17th Annual NALED Assembly

Mr. Ginkel started his assignment in Belgrade following service as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe, Tajikistan (2019-2021). Prior to his assignment in Dushanbe, Mr. Ginkel was the Director of the Office of Afghanistan Affairs at the Department of State in Washington, DC. He also served two previous assignments in Afghanistan. From 2013-2015, Mr. Ginkel was the Deputy Director of the Office of Regional Affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism. Mr. Ginkel has served a number of assignments in Europe: Political Counselor in Kosovo; Deputy Political Counselor at the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe; and assignments at the American Embassies in Riga, Latvia, and Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Prior to joining the U.S. Foreign Service, Mr. Ginkel was a Peace Corps Volunteer and a Fulbright scholar in Latvia, where he conducted research for his dissertation. Mr. Ginkel holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis.

Milojko Spajić was born in 1987 in Pljevlja. After finishing high school, Milojko completed his first year of studies at Osaka University as a scholarship holder of the Japanese government, through the five-year Monbukagakusho scholarship program, and then graduated in regular four-year studies in Econometrics and Quantitative Economics at the Faculty of Economic Sciences at Saitama University. As part of the exchange, he also spent one semester at the best Chinese technical university, Tsinghua. He obtained his master's degree, also as a scholarship holder, in France at HEC Paris, which according to the Financial Times is the number one school in Europe for finance. After that, he founded his start-up, and worked in Tokyo and Singapore, in the global banking group Goldman Sachs, but was also a partner of the Venture Capital fund in Singapore. He left the mentioned position after almost four years, coming to Montenegro, in order to help his homeland with his knowledge and experience. In addition to ours, he also speaks six world languages. As a non-party person, he was a member of the advisory team of Zdravko Krivokapić, the holder of the election list "For the Future of Montenegro" and the representative for the composition of the Government. He took the position of Minister of Finance and Social Welfare in December 2020 after the parliamentary elections. Milojko Spajić is a non-partisan figure in the Government of Montenegro.

Vladislav Cvetkovic is Director of Advisory Services in “PricewaterhouseCoopers” in Belgrade since 2013. He served as the Director of Privatization Agency from 2009 to 2013, managing all activities on the Serbian privatization agenda, including the improvement of privatization-related legislation. From 2001 to 2007 he was engaged in the National Bank of Serbia and the Agency for Deposit Insurance, as Advisor to the Governor and the leading advisor for privatization of banks. During this period, he led a number of projects related to banking sector reform and was directly engaged in formulating and successful implementation of the strategy and privatization of significant financial institutions in the country, also leading on several of the largest privatization projects in Serbia so far. From 2004 to 2005 he was a Council member in the National Bank of Serbia, and the Managing Board President in Komercijalna banka AD Beograd from 2006 to 2009. His professional career started in financial consulting in “Deloitte”, Belgrade, in 1994-2000, as well as in academia, as he was a lecturer at the Faculty of Economy in Belgrade, at the Business Finance and Accounting department.

Dragan Penezić holds a PhD on the topic "The modern concept of business through the development of Public and Private Partnership (Comparative study of PPP models in Europe - Solution for Serbia)" in 2010, and graduated from the Faculty of Economics in Belgrade in 1999. He joined British American Tobacco in 2016, where he started as a Government Affairs Manager and currently holds position of the Head of Legal and External Affairs for Serbia and Montenegro. Prior to his career in BAT, he held the position of the Secretary General of the Commission for the Protection of Competition of the Republic of Serbia, where he spent seven years and has been a member of the Negotiating Group for Chapter VIII (Competition and State Aid) in the process of Serbia's accession to the European Union. Dragan has extensive experience in public administration, first as Assistant Minister in the sector for concessions and public - private partnerships in the Ministry of International Economic Relations, and then in the Ministry of Trade and Services as Assistant Minister in the sector for trade, prices and consumer protection. He is a President of the NALED Assembly since 2017 and President of  FIC’s Anti-Illicit Committee from 2018.