Mihajlovic: Secret deals caused billions worth of damage

BELGRADE - The state is willing to provide assistance to healthy companies, Serbian Minister of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure Zorana Mihajlovic said on Monday, presenting the white and black lists of contractors.

The whitelist consists of 327 companies, with 213 companies on the blacklist - 87 out of the total 540 firms are shell companies that have no employees, Mihajlovic told a press conference.

There have been cases of buildings constructed without any of the required documents, while works on some structures lasted up to ten years, she said.

The firms are not the only ones to blame for this - so are the local self-government authorities that had allowed this to happen, Mihajlovic added.

Secret deals have resulted in chaos in the construction sector, causing billions of dinars worth of damage to the state, she said.

Someone has allowed that to happen in the past, and I expect the authorities to deal with this, she said.

Next year will be a year of construction in Serbia and order must be restored in the sector to make it clear who can participate in state-funded projects, Mihajlovic said.

Infrastructure facilities will be built in 2015, with cheap housing projects also to be implemented in collaboration with the United Arab Emirates, she said.

The modernisation of a 63-kilometre rail line section on Corridor 10 will start in February, with the works on the rail line from Belgrade to Budapest, the construction of the Zezelj Bridge in Novi Sad (destroyed in the 1999 NATO bombing) and the reconstruction of the rail line from Belgrade to Montenegro's Adriatic city of Bar all scheduled to start in the summer, the minister said.

Also to start next summer...