Serbia’s Procurement Corrupted?

The €4 billion Serbia spends every year on public purchasing is a sum that indicates that public procurement could be a hotbed of corruption, according to corruption watchdog group Transparency Serbia.

The lack of tenders and favoring some bidders are the biggest problems, the watchdog concluded following a one-day conference on budgetary savings and harmonizing Serbia’s practices with those of the European Union, which Serbia hopes to join.

One recent example cited at the conference was Serbia’s importing trains from Sweden without a tender.

A €70,000 Toilet

Other procurements that raised eyebrows – even with tenders – were the €70,000 price tag for a new toilet in a central Serbian train station, and the price hikes of the recent renovation of the Belgrade airport.

Serbia’s public procurement has come under fire before, most notably from the European Commission (EC) in its annual reports on Serbia’s path to the European Union. Procurement in Serbia, said the EC in its November report, has no independent or efficient agencies to monitor it and is dogged by corruption.

“Experts believe that 10 percent of the money spent on public purchasing could be saved through better efficiency and by combating corruption. If we work on the basis that €4 billion are spent on public purchasing in Serbia annually, the saving would amount to €400 million, and that’s the amount of money missing in the budget today,” said an official with the European Commission office in Serbia.

A new law that came on the books on Jan. 1 could be a remedy, said procurement department head Predrag Jovanovic, but he added that that will depend on whether the authorities decide that procurement is an area where they can save money.

-- Beth Kampschror