Branislav Ivković (; born 7 August 1952), known as Bane, is a Serbian engineer, academic, and former politician. He was a cabinet minister in the government of Serbia from 1994 to 2000 and served in the parliaments of Serbia, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and Serbia and Montenegro. At one time a prominent figure in the Socialist Party of Serbia (Socijalistička partija Srbije, SPS), he led the breakaway Socialist People's Party (Socijalistička narodna stranka, SNS) in the early 2000s. Early life, private career, and academic career Ivković was born in Bijeljina, in what was then the People's Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. Raised in the community, he graduated from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Civil Engineering in 1979, earned a master's degree in 1983, and received a Ph.D. in 1988 with the thesis, "Optimization of reliability of production systems in construction." He became an assistant at the university in 1981, was promoted to assistant professor in 1989, and became an associate professor in 1994. Ivković has participated in engineering projects in Israel, Kuwait, and Russia, as well as in Serbia. Politician Ivković's political career began in the 1990s, at a time the political life of Serbia and Yugoslavia was dominated by the authoritarian rule of Socialist Party leader Slobodan Milošević. He appeared in the twenty-fifth position on the Socialist Party's electoral list for the Belgrade division in the 1993 Serbian parliamentary election. The list won sixteen seats, and he was not awarded a mandate. (From 1992 to 2000, Serbia's electoral law stipulated that one-third of parliamentary mandates would be assigned to candidates on successful lists in numerical order, while the remaining two-thirds would be distributed amongst other candidates at the discretion of sponsoring parties or coalitions. Ivković could have been given a mandate despite his list position, though he was not.) The SPS won the election and afterward formed a new government. Ivković became vice-president of the party's city board in Belgrade. Minister of Urban Development and Housing (1994–1998) Ivković was appointed as minister of urban development and housing in the first government of Mirko Marjanović on 18 March 1994. One of his responsibilities was finding accommodations for the large numbers of refugees who arrived in Serbia during the Yugoslav Wars of the mid-1990s. In September 1995, he described a $41.5 million pledge for refugee aid from the United Nations and related