It is precisely through these works that “money acquired through corruption is laundered most easily,” was one of the messages from the presentation of the White Book on Corruption in Belgrade and Anti-Corruption Measures by the Centre for Local Self-Government (CLS).
“Corruption is a tangible thing. When honest firms cannot compete and win a tender, they have to lay off workers and close down their business. “It is the cancer of our society. “Today we are witnessing a metastasis,” stated Nikola Jovanović, Director of CLS, at the presentation of the analysis on 1st July in Belgrade.
Rooting out corruption in the capital of Serbia could save €140 million annually, concluded the CLS anti-corruption team. This is a figure they arrived at by analysing sWhiubsidies for private transport operators, investor-led urbanism, and other controversial items in the period from 2023 to 2026.
“We started with Belgrade because that is where corruption is highest, but the problems are similar in other cities as well,” Jovanović emphasised.
Belgrade’s budget for 2026 is around 205 billion dinars, with city revenues accounting for more than 190 billion. Just over 15 billion dinars is allocated to the municipalities.
Serbia is ranked 116th out of 182 positions globally on the Corruption Perceptions Index list and is the worst-ranked of all the former Yugoslav republics, Transparency International announced.
Through which channels is the most money being drained, and can corruption be stopped, and how?
Single-digit number of verdicts
Money is most frequently drained through public procurement, pointed out Vanja Bojović, a professor at the Faculty of Law in Belgrade, during the presentation. This refers to legally regulated processes in which the state, public enterprises, and institutions use public funds to purchase goods, services, or execution of works from private companies.
“Around 90 per cent of public procurement contains corrupt elements, but the annual number of verdicts for the criminal offence of abuse of official position in Serbia is in the single digits,” she stated.
Money is also drained through public-private partnerships and state subsidies. In recent years, as she pointed out, interstate agreements have become increasingly prevalent, under which certain projects are not subject to public scrutiny – such as the reconstruction of the Novi Sad railway station canopy, the Expo, and the construction of the Belgrade metro.
In the collapse of the canopy in 2024, 16 people lost their lives, and protests were organised across Serbia demanding accountability for their deaths, but so far there has been no legal resolution. According to the 2021 draft Metro Law, the two metro lines – which are still awaited – will cost six billion euros. The key partners on the project are the Chinese company Power China, France’s Alstom and Egis, and the domestic company Millennium Team.
“You bring in your own firms so they can get the job, you put this nation into debt, public debt is rising, and the only ones benefiting are certain contractors and subcontractors. “When you put private interest ahead of public office, you should bear responsibility, but that does not happen – here, scandals follow one after another without any legal outcome,” Professor Bojović pointed out.
In the city, around 40 firms win almost every contract, and only one to two bidders apply for tenders, according to the analysis.
‘Politicians control private firms’
In the period from 2023 to the present day, Belgrade’s coffers have lost around one billion euros (approx. 117 billion dinars) due to corruption, according to a rough estimate by Dušan Pavlović, a professor of contemporary political economy at the Faculty of Political Sciences (FPN).
Around half a billion in funds was lost due to the negative business performance of certain municipal enterprises, while the greatest loss, around 46.8 billion dinars, was due to missed or uncollected revenues. “This could have been generated as revenue and used for investment into specific public services, but it wasn’t,” Professor Pavlović pointed out.
Public procurements that were controversial from start to finish, such as advertising campaigns for public enterprises or information boards for public transport, cost Belgrade around 40.3 billion dinars. There were also good public procurements, but as the FPN professor says, they were overpriced, and around 25.05 billion dinars was drained through that surplus.
“This is just Belgrade, but it is structurally similar in other cities,” Pavlović said.
Unlike some countries where private enterprises control politicians and the public administration and remain in business even when regimes change, in Serbia, and in certain other Balkan states, the situation is reversed, he noted. “Politicians use private enterprises to drain money from city coffers. “Private enterprises participating in public procurement are controlled, and sometimes it happens that politicians themselves participate in establishing them,” he added.
In what way could corruption be suppressed?
The formation of a special prosecution office for high-level corruption, prosecutorial police, new competencies for the State Audit Institution, and the introduction of a new criminal offence of illicit enrichment were pointed out by experts at the presentation of the White Book. They believe that results would be visible within the very first months, provided the authorities were accountable.
(BBC Serbia, 03.07.2026)
https://www.bbc.com/serbian/articles/cjegngw0zq1o/lat
