Serbia’s new Finance Minister, Sinisa Mali, announced the end of the public administration reform for next year or by 2021 and said the hard part will be defining the salaries for public servants.

„The salaries structure is important for the IMF and we will see if there is room for a salary increase which we have announced,“ he said ahead of Monday’s meeting with the IMF in Belgrade.  

„On the other hand, we are facing a reform of salaries and salary grades which we have started in 2016 when we passed the law,“ Mali told Tanjug agency.  

He said that negotiations with the IMF are no longer that difficult in „the sense of as layoffs, reductions, we are done with that.“  

„Decision making can be easy or hard but implementing it is the ugly side of the medal because when we speak of the number of employees, we are talking about 400,000 people that will be effected by such a measure,“ Mali said.  

„We are talking about dozens of organizations, ministries, institutions that will have apply this in their bookkeeping. This is where I see the problem and the focus of my negotiations with the IMF,“ Mali said.