Public administration

BELGRADE - There is great investor interest in the privatisation of Serbia's state-owned companies, Serbian Minister of Finance Dusan Vujovic said on Thursday.

"The Privatisation Agency has received many letters of interest, and as many as 60 percent of them are credible," Vujovic told a regional conference on free zones, held at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Serbia.

The process of checking the authenticity of the qualifications of civil servants hired in the broader public sector during the period of major waste and corruption must move on.

The evaluation of all those employed in the public sector must start at one point and actually be carried out.

Taxpayers will save almost 11 million euros a year as a result of a reorganization of Greece’s public administration, which is due to take place before the end of the year, Kathimerini has learned.

BELGRADE - The Serbian parliament adopted on Wednesday a set of laws on state admiinstration that should provide coordination between bodies, organisations and institutions of the public sector.

The amendments to the law on state administration say that heads of special organisations, their deputies and heads of administrative districts will be public officials from now on.

A new committee consisting of 40 officials from the relevant ministries has been formed by Finance Minister Gikas Hardouvelis to assess the progress of liberalization measures introduced since the start of the crisis in the services sector.

 Education, Administrative Reform ministry sources say pledges will be honored

Government officials on Thursday sought to play down a rift between Education Minister Andreas Loverdos and Administrative Development Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis over the possible firing of administrative staff at universities as part of a civil service overhaul demanded by the troika.

The Romanian state reserves the right of postponing the implementation of the schedule for the liberalization of the natural gas price for households until a dispute with the European Commission is settled; therefore, this price will not increase on October 1 as previously scheduled, the Department of Energy informed in a release.

Greece’s civil servants’ union, ADEDY, decided on Friday that its members should abstain from efforts to complete evaluations of public sector employees.

The union said it would maintain this stance until its demands for changes to the process are met or until the deadline for the assessments to be completed, November 1, has been reached.

BELGRADE - No official records are kept on the government agencies in Serbia, and politicians and analysts agree that the sector is in need of regulation and that some agencies will be shut down as part of the announced reforms.

By Dimitris Kontogiannis