Serbian Parties Start Dividing Company Spoils

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By Bojana Barlovac

Following the general election and as talks on forming a new coalition government continue, the key political parties are discussing dividing up plum posts in public enterprises.

Unofficial talks on the distribution of state-owned companies have started in Serbia, following the conclusion of a coalition deal between the Democrats and the Socialists on forming a new government.

As in the past, the most attractive prizes are those state-owned companies that either turn a profit or obtain large funds from the state budget.

These include: Telekom Srbija, the power utility EPS, the gas company Srbijagas and the construction company, Putevi Srbije.

For instance, the director of Telekom Srbija has a salary of about 3,500 euro a month, which is ten times the average monthly salary in Serbia.

The fresh discussions on dividing up the companies come even though the parties promised in the election campaign to stop treating state-owned firms as part of the political spoils.

Boris Begovic, of the Center for Liberal-Democratic Studies, believes that Serbia must stop appointing party officials to head public enterprises for a start.

“Serbia has 1,340 state owned companies with about 100,000 employees which in 2010 had loss of a billion euro or 3.5 per cent of the GDP, while a total subsidies and transfers to these enterprises in 2011 amounted to about 2.3 per cent of GDP,” Begovic noted.

The government needs to improve the management of public enterprises and productivity and reduce bureaucracy, corruption and subsidies to make them more efficient and competitive, he added.

Meanwhile, the Democrats and Socialists are still holding unofficial talks on forming a coalition government with a third party, the Liberals.

Their plan is for a government consisting of 15 ministries, of which the Democrats would have seven, the Socialists five and the Liberals three.

On Wednesday Tomislav Nikolic, Serbia’s newly elected President, is supposed to meet a delegation composed by the Democrats and discuss forming a government.

The deadline for the formation of a new government is September 5.

Balkan Insight

The Balkan Insight (formerly the Balkin Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN) is a close group of editors and trainers that enables journalists in the region to produce in-depth analytical and investigative journalism on complex political, economic and social themes. BIRN emerged from the Balkan programme of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, IWPR, in 2005. The original IWPR Balkans team was mandated to localise that programme and make it sustainable, in light of changing realities in the region and the maturity of the IWPR intervention. Since then, its work in publishing, media training and public debate activities has become synonymous with quality, reliability and impartiality. A fully-independent and local network, it is now developing as an efficient and self-sustainable regional institution to enhance the capacity for journalism that pushes for public debate on European-oriented political and economic reform.

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