Source: Poslovni.hr
When Serbian government established the Export Credit and Insurance Agency (AOFI) in 2005, goal was to help exporters and strengthen the Serbian economy. The then Finance Minister, Mlađan Dinkić, said that “the loans will not be given to anyone, but only to confirmed exporters.”
Nine years later, the conditions under which assistance was granted and the names of AOFI’s clients were kept hidden from the public eye. Even six months after the Center for Investigative Reporting in Serbia (CINS) submitted a request for access to information, AOFI had not provided more information about their work, according to an article published by the daily Danas, whose author was CINS’s journalist Vladimir Kostić. The article includes data about two contracts that AOFI made with the Pink International Company, broadcaster of the Pink TV.
Journalists of CINS came into possession of the documents while investigating contracts in the Serbian Business Registers Agency (APR). The first contract shows that in August 2014 AOFI issued a guarantee to Pink in the amount of €2.5 million in favor of AIK Bank. The second contract was concluded in December, when Pink received a loan of €1.4 million from AOFI, enabling the financing of agreements with companies BH Telecom from Sarajevo and MTEL from Podgorica. During the same year, 2014, Pink appears on lists of the Tax Administration as one of the biggest tax debtors.
Unpaid tax debt
At the time the contract on guarantee was negotiated, deferred payment of a part of the tax debt had not yet been granted, so it remains unclear how Pink met the condition under which clients of AOFI cannot have tax debt. Neither AOFI nor Pink were willing to talk to the CINS’ journalists, so the questions regarding the grounds on which Pink fulfilled the conditions for the loan and the guarantee remain unanswered.
Guarantees were also issued on agreement claims by which Pink sold the licenses to a package of Pink channels to the Public Enterprise of PTT Communications Serbia, or rather its cable system, for one euro per month per user of the package. According to the AOFI’s official website, one of the conditions for obtaining the guarantee and the loan is the certificate of the Tax Administration on settled tax liabilities. Three days before the conclusion of the guarantee contract, on 5 August 2014, only one part of Pink’s debt amounted to more than €1.5 million. CINS tried to find out more about debt and debt rescheduling agreed with Pink, but the Tax Administration responded that the data on taxpayers are classified.
