The Prokop railway station, known as Skadar on Bojana of Serbian road infrastructure, which has been under construction for half a century, should finally be given its final shape by the company of the famous Serbian businessman Branislav Grujic.
Namely, Grujic is one of the co-owners of the company Railway City Belgrade, which the Republic Property Directorate has chosen as a private partner for the joint construction of the railway station building and accompanying facilities.
The framework agreement on the joint construction of the railway station building, parking lot and accompanying commercial facilities on the board and the transfer of real estate rights between Serbia and Railway City d.o.o Belgrade, as an investor was concluded on 14.05.2020. Transparency Serbia recently warned that the procedure prescribed by law was not respected on that occasion.
As the program director of Transpratnost, Nemanja Nenadic, explained to Nova.rs earlier, this is a public-private partnership, and the procedure provided by the law that regulates that area was not followed.
On the website of the Commission for Public-Private Partnership, according to him, which should approve this project, there is no trace that it has gone through the legally prescribed procedure, and the public invitation to those interested in this job did not specify all the criteria.
In addition to all that, as Nenadic warned, the public was quite excluded from the decision-making process, so the details of this job became known only recently, thanks to the interest of the media.
What do we know?
The company Railway City d.o.o Belgrade, which got the job, was founded in April 2019, three months before the Republic Directorate issued a public invitation to “potential partners” in July of the same year. The founding capital of the company is a little less than 50 euros, as the activity is the elaboration of construction projects, while the director is Dejan Dedijer.
Data from the Business Registers Agency further show that the owner of the Belgrade company is the Cypriot Railway from Cyprus, whose real owners are again Branislav Grujcć and Arkadij Zelmanovic with a 50 percent share each.
Branislav Grujic, a well-known Serbian businessman, is one of the founders and co-president of PSP Farman Holding, which is presented as a multinational and multifunctional real estate investment company.
At the official website of PSP Farman Holding, the president’s message, jointly signed by Branislav Grujic and Arkady Blank, points out that the holding includes “several Russian and European companies with their unique knowledge, experience and reputation” that want to be a leader in construction from day one.
They state how they build business and industrial buildings for internationally renowned companies; hotels and shopping malls managed by leading chains and modern sports facilities certified by international associations.
According to what can be seen at the official presentation of the holding in Serbia, it includes PFB d.o.o., with an address in Visnjiceva Street, as well as Jugodrvo holding and PFB design with an address in Bulevar Milutina Milankovica. At the presentation of the holding, you can find contacts of related companies in Russia, Belgium and Italy.
Certainly one of the most significant projects of this holding in Serbia is the West 65 residential complex, which, as it is stated so far, has housed 2,000 tenants and opened its doors to about 70 retail facilities.
In the section on the investor at the presentation of the West 65 project, it is stated that PSP Farman Holding has been operating in the field of development, design, construction and equipping of facilities for over 30 years and that it has built in Russia, Great Britain, Belgium, Belarus, Ukraine, Italy and Serbia over 2 million square meters.
The Serbian-Russian duo that leads this holding is also mentioned in a Maltese company. Then KRIK announced that Branislav Grujic, a Serbian businessman who has been living in Russia for years, appears in the “Paradise Papers” project as a co-owner of the Maltese company “PF Properties Limited”, and that his partner is the Russian Arkady Zelmanovic.
Branislav Grujićc, as can be found in his scarce biographies on the Internet, was born in Belgrade in 1961. After attending primary and secondary school in Germany and Serbia, he graduated as an engineer at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Belgrade and completed his studies in the German city of Karlsruhe.
After graduating, he became one of the youngest assistants for theoretical mechanics in the history of the University of Belgrade.
Then, in 1992, he became the director of engineering in Jugodrvo, where he remained until 1994, when he left Yugoslavia.
He founded the company Farman engineering in 1991 and with it he later made a breakthrough on the Russian market. PSP Farman Holding was formed in 1997 by merging PSP and Farman engineering. Grujic is a prominent member of the Serbian Business Club “Privrednik”, which brings together the most important businessmen in Serbia. He has won several different business awards.
In one of the rare interviews he gave in 2013 during the Business Forum on Kopaonik, he talked about his business success and what it brought him.
“I can’t boast of having a better life. I was much happier when I was an assistant at the faculty, worked with a different dynamic, and had more time for socializing and sports. That is in your business, ‘I would give a dinar to enter the circle, and two to get out of it,” Grujic said on that occasion, Nova reports.
