BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — A university in Serbia has determined that the government’s finance minister has plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. thesis, in a blow to President Aleksandar Vucic’s populists.

Belgrade University said Thursday that its ethics committee established that Sinisa Mali “literally took over texts, or entire paragraphs, from the texts of other authors without listing the names of the authors.”

There has been no immediate comment from Mali or the government. He has repeatedly denied plagiarizing his Ph.D. thesis, which focuses on restructuring and privatization and their results in Serbia.

A close associate of Vucic, Mali first was the mayor of Belgrade before joining Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic’s government. The Balkan country is seeking European Union membership after the war era in the 1990s.