Beogradjanka was sold, and Sava Center did not manage to get a new owner from the second attempt, which does not mean that some new offer from the City of Belgrade, with a possibly lower price of 21.9 million euros, will not attract a new investor. Along with Beogradjanka and the Sava Center, there is another recognizable symbol of the city, which was already offered for sale more than a decade ago, but even today the ownership over it is kept as – social. It is the Belgrade Fair.
On September 10, a red alarm and red lights illuminated the Belgrade Fair.
At that time, the management of the Belgrade Fair pointed out that the entire fair industry had been earning zero pennies since March, due to the coronavirus pandemic. In addition, the Belgrade Fair Hall served as a temporary hospital during the state of emergency.
In order to draw attention to this problem, the Fair also performed by lighting its largest hall in red. After the spring passed completely without fairs, the fall will obviously be the same by the decisions of the Crisis Staff of the Republic of Serbia.
For us as fair organizers, that means income of zero pennies from March until now. The city of Belgrade and the Republic of Serbia will be left without 120 million euros worth of goods and services sold, and thousands of employees in this industry will lose their jobs.
“This situation is unbearable for us and for the entire industry,” it was written in the official announcement on the website of the Belgrade Fair.
This kind of warning, called the “Red Alarm for the Fair Industry”, was part of the global #RedAlertRestart campaign, launched with the intention of pointing out to the global public the problem of the impossibility of the event industry.
Still social property
However, the problem of the Fair is not only this current one – coronavirus.
Although the 2006 Constitution provides for the transformation of social property into private, and the Law on Privatization provides for the mandatory privatization of social capital “no later than December 31, 2015″, the Belgrade Fair is still a socially-owned enterprise, it has been determined what is state property in the funds used by the Fair, and what is not. The procedure is still ongoing – the 2015 ruling ruled that 26.48% of these funds are state property, and then the Commercial Court rejected the request of the Republic of Serbia to declare the remaining 73.52% state-owned, however, this ruling is still not final.
On the day of the expiration of the deadline for mandatory privatization, the law was amended by introducing a provision that privatization should not be carried out on companies where the process of determining the share of state property has been initiated.
How the Belgrade Fair works
During 2019, according to the official final accounts submitted to the Business Registers Agency, the Belgrade Fair operated at a profit.
Net profit in 2019 was 750 thousand euros, while the year before the profit was 516 thousand euros.
Another problem in the business of the Fair is the inability to collect receivables from customers.
Thus, only in 2018 and 2019, receivables of 4 million euros, were written off. Receivables based on sales whose collection is over 60 days late are considered impaired and their value is adjusted against expenses,” is stated in the Notes to the financial report for 2019.
Out of the total amount of receivables from customers in the country and abroad, the company sued a larger number of customers by the end of December 2019 for the amount of 1.2 euros in order to collect its receivables.
“The entire amount of these receivables has been indirectly written off,” reads the document of the Belgrade Fair. On the one hand, the Fair continuously writes off receivables from customers, but successfully collects receivables from former employees.
The Belgrade Fair had dinar and foreign currency time deposits with Universal Bank, which ended in bankruptcy, BiF reports.
