Vucic comments United Group statement

"When we offered N1 and Nova S, when I publicly offered them an agreement with Telekom, to be on Telekom's network and to be seen everywhere on those networks. But no, the criminal (United Group owner) did not want that because he wanted exclusivity for SBB, so that he could maintain a majority and stuff enormous amounts of money into his pockets from cable provider fees. He didn’t care about that at all. What was important was that that was the only way, which he considered, that exclusivity gave SBB an advantage,” he said replying to a Euronews Serbia reporter’s request for a comment on the statement from United Group about Telekom Serbia’s purchase of the Total TV platform.

Vucic was referring to the time 5 years ago when Telekom removed N1 from those platforms after buying two cable operators. At that time, 300,000 households lost N1 and now the purchase of Total TV means that another 180,000 households are being denied access.

It is true that in 2020 Telekom offered free acquisition of N1, while United Media published a public call and the conditions under which this was possible, because in case of free acquisition, N1 would not have the means to finance its programming. At the time, Telekom offered UM a free acquisition of our program, which would mean shutting down a program that could not be produced without any compensation.

We said at that time that only television stations with national frequencies would be distributed for free. In that context, N1 was indeed interested in a national frequency, and if it had received it, any distributor would have been able to broadcast N1 for free throughout the territory of Serbia. Of course, that never happened.

The offer to get N1 at 0.4 euros per user was far lower than the price Telekom was paying for the channels of Kopernikus and Pink, while Telekom was offering UM free acquisition of our program. This misleading of the public, falsehoods, and insults that the President of Serbia utters in public addresses never end up in court, because Aleksandar Vučić defends himself from legal proceedings with presidential immunity.