The state has so far invested at least 47 million euros in the construction of the Chinese vaccine factory against the corona virus. However, it does not produce anything.
The company Life Biotech, which was founded to produce Sinopharm vaccines in Serbia, had neither income nor expenses related to production or investments during the last year. Financial reports indicate that the largest part of the company’s expenses last year went to employee salaries, almost 12 million dinars (about 101,000 euros).
This company was founded in December 2021 by the Arab-Chinese company Hayat Biotech and Serbia. During 2022, the company had 12.2 million dinars in business expenses. The total expenses of the company at the same time amounted to 13.5 million dinars.
Since there was no income, the loss is equal to the sum of business expenses (salary expenses and intangible expenses) and financial expenses of 1.3 million dinars, which include interest expenses and negative exchange differences.
Of this sum, 11.9 million dinars were spent on salary costs, and 315,000 dinars on intangible costs (accounting services, payment transaction costs and other paid fees).
At the end of 2022, Life Biotech had four employees, according to the financial report.
Salaries paid from the founding capital
Assuming that all four employees worked throughout 2022 and that this was the largest number of employees during the year, it means that the company allocated 247,500 dinars per employee per month.
In question is the gross amount of earnings, and the net salary in that case was about 152,000 dinars per employee.
Salaries were paid from the founding capital, that is, from the money paid by Hayat Biotech and Serbia.
In December 2022, Hayat Biotech paid 111.5 million dinars (948,700 euros). In May and September last year, Serbia paid a total of about 11.4 million dinars (97,400 euros).
That is five percent of the total investment that the Arab company and Serbia have committed to. Namely, when the company was founded, the basic capital of more than 2.5 billion dinars (21.6 million euros) was subscribed.
A hypothetical factory
This company is majority owned by the Arab company Hayat Biotech (67 percent), while Serbia owns 33 percent. Life Biotech has three directors, namely Naser Ali Khameis Al Jamahi (Nasser Ali Khameis Alyammahi) from the United Arab Emirates, Li Li from China and Nikola Rudović from Serbia.
Life Biotech is registered at the address of the Republic Health Insurance Fund (RFZO). Rudović said in February of last year that the reason for this is that they still do not have their own premises and that it is a “company in the making”. However, the address has not been changed to date.
When asked about the company’s work, Rudović said that it was a “state project and a state factory” and that they were working according to what had already been agreed between three countries (Serbia, the United Arab Emirates and China).
Let us remind you that, as New Economy wrote, Serbia has so far signed contracts worth at least 5.6 billion dinars (47.7 million euros) related to the construction of a vaccine factory and supporting infrastructure.
The construction was managed by the Ministry of Defense, while Belgrade was in charge of equipping the site.
Although the director of RFZO Sanja Radojević Škodrić said at the end of last year that the first phase, which involves the packaging of the imported substance, will begin in March and April 2022, there is still no information on whether the factory has actually started operating, and the authorities they no longer advertise in connection with the operation of the factory.
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