Donor conference provided "favorable loans"

Donor conference provided "favorable loans"

BELGRADE -- Marko Blagojević has said that out of EUR 995 million which donors pledged for Serbia during a conference earlier this week, "115 million are pure donations."

The rest, the head of the Serbian government's office for flood reconstruction explained, are favorable loans.

Blagojević spoke after the conference held in Brussels on Wednesday and mention a loan from the Japanese government as an example:

"The Japanese government has approved a particularly favorable 40-year repayment loan of EUR 40 million, with an interest rate of 0.01 percent and grace period of 10 years."

"This loan will be the first that the government will consider. The World Bank also approved a very favorable emergency loan of EUR 120 million for reconstruction that we can use immediately, because it means the money spent from our budget or other sources will be compensated later," Blagojević told the daily Politika.

He added that Serbia can also redirect existing loans from the World Bank "for roads that are already included in the existing indebtedness of the state, which means that the public debt would not be increased."

Blagojević said it was "good and commendable" for Serbia that the conference pledged nearly one billion euros - "about 200 million more than Bosnia received, although its damage was 200 million higher."

According to reports ahead of the donor conference on Wednesday, Serbia calculated the damage from the May disaster to be some EUR 1.5 billion, while Bosnia-Herzegovina reported its losses to be over EUR 2 billion.

Blagojević told the daily that of the EUR 995 million pledged to Serbia, 115 million are "pure...