“About Last year was good for privatization, with about seventy companies left in the portfolio that once had more than 600 companies waiting for a solution.
However, according to Steven Ndegwa, head of the World Bank office in Serbia, the process is still slow and there are still problems with the management of public companies.
“We have acting directors running public companies, although the law on public companies is clear on how directors are elected and how long they can be acting. They have a shortened horizon when deciding, and they also have legal restrictions on their actions. Performance indicators should be determined and determined whether directors will remain at the forefront of public companies or not”, Ndegwa said.
He also estimated that large state-owned enterprises have a bad influence on competition on the one hand, being so large and on the other that the state can protect them, set prices, etc.
60 percent of the subsidies were given to state-owned companies, and they generated about 20 percent of value added. It is not a very efficient use of funds”, Ndegwa said.
Until a few years ago, the state spent 1 billion euros on public enterprises, and now it costs about 300 million euros. Ndegva, on the other hand, thinks we should not be happy about it.
“It’s like a household loses a thousand euros a month, then it goes down to 300 euros. Is that a reason to be pleased? Half of Corridor 10 costs 300 million euros”, Ndegwa noted.
Milun Trivunac, secretary of state at the Ministry of Economy, said that privatization of public companies cannot be discussed as it was the privatization of state and socially owned companies from the portfolio of the Privatization Agency.
“There are many larger and more significant companies remaining. The state has a project with the EBRD to determine the strategy for managing public companies. The first task is to list the state-owned companies, because the state does not even know where all the shares are. Branches should be found where there is no need for the state to be present, but companies with a public interest such as EPS or Srbijagas should also be defined. Large public companies have study libraries on how to restructure. Perhaps the solution is to introduce a minority partner. If, for example, 5-6 percent of the shares were listed on the stock market, the interest of minority shareholders in controlling the company would appear, the level of corporate awareness would be raised”, Trivunac said.
At a time when Srbijagas was taking over its debtors and making losses, in the same forum Bajatovic was called a state tycoon “because I was taking over more companies than the entire private sector”. Now Srbijagas is making a profit, and it will be around 35 million euros last year, but as Bajatovic says, because the state has yet to pay for the construction of the Turkish Stream pipeline through Serbia. Bajatovic claims that neither the World Bank nor the IMF are needed to restructure public companies, not even Srbijagas.
“I asked them and they did not know to explain to me how to do a positive business, if I buy gas for two dinars, sell it for one and do not pay 30 percent of the claims yet”, Bajatovic described his troubles while the gas price was guided by social policy.
“We can talk about restructuring when our founder says that we do not have to carry out social policy, keep employees, charge gas. When they freed my hands and prevented them from stealing gas, when we started to charge, to seek bank guarantees, everything changed”, Bajatovic explains, adding that by writing off 1.2 billion euros of debt to the state, this company cleared all balances and that there were no due but unpaid debt. Even though it still exists in public companies, Bajatovic himself says that “EPS has three times more employees than it needs” or “if too much money is pumped out of public companies, especially local ones.”
He added that it meant more to Srbijagas that it could take a loan of 70 million euros over seven years at 1.25 percent than all the reforms proposed by the IMF and the World Bank, Danas reports.
