Radar: Belgrade Waterfront – Benefits or damages

Vucic made his claim at a ceremony in the newly-opened St Regis hotel in the Waterfront project’s Belgrade Tower, saying that the amount was assessed by London-based Oxera.

The Insajder portal asked Finance Minister Sinisa Mali about the value of the 177 hectares of land donated for the Belgrade Waterfront and he replied saying: “You tell me, there were some 500 illegal buildings with no one paying any taxes. Could someone have built something there? No. So, how much was that land worth. I think it was worth absolutely nothing,” he said.

Economy Professor Ognjen Radonjic told Radar that the government, as a minority shareholder, joined in the project with the land whose market value is more than 3.5 billion Euro, leasing it to the majority partner for a period of 99 years for free instead of selling it and using the money for social security, build schools, hospitals. Radonjic said that the overall profits of the project in its nine years stand at around 145 million Euro with 30 million earmarked for dividends and 9.7 million Euro paid into the national budget.

Economists who spoke to Radar said they aren’t clear how the authorities reached the figure of 9.7 billion Euro, the more so since the Belgrade Waterfront company’s overall revenue totaled about a billion Euro or 10 times less than the claim.
Dragovan Milicevic, a former Trade Ministry state secretary, said that Belgrade Waterfront’s gross VAT stood at some 6.7 billion Dinars (1 Euro – 117 Dinars) and that it contributed 7.2 billion Dinars to the GDP in 2023. Even if the revenue stood about the same every year since it was set, the Belgrade Waterfron’t contribution to the GDP would not have been higher than 620 million Euro. The project’s overall revenue in the first six and a half years stood at 295 million Euro.

Economist Milan Kovacevic said that the damage outweighs the benefits of the project. He warned that the Belgrade Waterfront company is selling apartments for 4,000 Euro a square meter and should be reporting huge revenues “unless the money is being siphoned off somewhere”. Radonjic warned that the project could be raising the Serbian GDP though money laundering and that the cost of the project is yet to come. “Our attention is focused on lithium mining and other things are going ahead unnoticed,” he added.

Radar said that there are no available official documents or studies to back up the official claims of huge benefits and that the documents showing its cost to taxpayers.