From the end of April to the beginning of July, the Development Fund approved a total of 968 liquidity loans worth 42.6 million euros to the economy and entrepreneurs, as part of state aid due to the Covid- 19 pandemic.
Although we did not receive the Fund’s answers, information can be found on their website starting from the meeting of the Board of Directors on April 24, when they approved loans with more favorable interest rates, which the state provided to all businessmen in the country who meet the conditions until the last session last week.
According to these data, the Fund approved 922 loans to the economy and entrepreneurs and 46 loans to entrepreneurs in tourism, catering and transport, which from June 10 could apply separately for favorable loans as the most vulnerable sectors.
In the same period, the Fund rejected a total of 218 liquidity loan applications.
From the budget funds, the state set aside 200 million euros for these loans, of which a fifth has been spent so far, and the loan given to the economy has a repayment period of up to 36 months with a grace period of up to 12 months and an interest rate of one percent annually.
The minimum loan amount for one borrower with related parties for companies is 8 thousand euros and for registered entrepreneurs, cooperatives and business entities 1.5 thousand euros.
One of the basic conditions for someone to exercise the right to this loan is that the business entity in the period from March 15, ie from the introduction of the state of emergency until the expiration of three months after the release of funds does not reduce the number of employees by more than 10 percent.
On the other hand, banks also offered more favorable loans to the endangered economy. These are commercial loans with a state guarantee, and the Association of Serbian Banks told our paper that according to aggregate data collected at the level of the banking sector, as of June 30, 2020, a total of 11,844 such requests were received in the total amount of 1.13 billion euros.
“8,831 requests in the total amount of 760 million euros were approved,” the Association of Banks states for Danas.
In order to reduce the effects of the crisis, banks in Serbia started approving liquidity loans with a state guarantee in April, and two billion euros were set aside for that.
The repayment period of these commercial loans is 36 months, with a grace period of nine to 12 months. The maximum amount of an individual loan is 25 percent of the income from the previous year, or up to three million euros.
The economy praised every state aid, primarily three minimums, but also more favorable loans through the Development Fund, but what is now necessary, according to some in the catering sector, is to speed up the process, ie to resolve requests faster.
Nebojsa Atanackovic from the Union of Employers of Serbia says for Danas that the loans of the Development Fund are more favorable, and those with commercial banks are a little less attractive for those who are most endangered.
“In both cases, I think that these loans are intended for good companies, those that have a good perspective, and I think that the Fund will gladly approve them.” In the case of commercial banks, the state guarantees some 80 percent, and I think that the money could have been used in a different way,” Atanackovic points out, adding that the percentage of those who repay loans irregularly used to be over 20 percent, but he believes that now below 10 percent.
He says that there will be no money for those who need money the most, and that they did not get much with these loans.
“Commercial banks do not want to risk even those 20 percent. The position of the Union was to help those who need help the most, those who work with 10 or 20 percent of the capacity and who are burdened by the fact that they are not allowed to fire anyone until October,” Nebojsa Atanackovic notes, Danas writes.
