Getting rich in the age of corona: How one company equipped all state hospitals

In 2021, the little-known company Magna Pharmacia managed to position itself as third in terms of net profit in the group of all trading companies operating in Serbia, ahead of Delez company, which ranked fourth that year.

As specified by NIN weekly, this success is even greater if bearing in mind that Magna Pharmacia had 81 employees that year, while Delez employed more than 11,000 people.

The rise of Magna Pharmacia, according to NIN, coincided with the SNS party coming into power but it reached its peak during the pandemic.

NIN weekly also noted that in the same way all the construction jobs, such as the construction of covid hospitals or vaccine factories, were awarded to Termomont, so Magna Pharmacia was hired for the complete equipment of health institutions, starting with the covid hospitals in Batajnica, Krusevac and Novi Sad, as well as the University Clinical Center of Serbia .

The same company also had a monopoly over the import of PCR tests, according to the same source.

It is typical for the large procurement jobs that Magna Pharmacia got that competing companies, including the Chinese Sinopharm, indicated that the conditions of public procurement, even when the laws were apparently respected, were tailored so that only one bidder could respond to them, according to NIN.