Waiting for tennis, six years have passed – Economy

It has been six full years since Aleksandar Vučić was invited by the owner of one of the largest meat industries in the world, Clemens Tennis in Germany, and more than four when he announced a large investment in tennis in our country.

Photo: FoNet / Slobodan Miljevic

In February 2016, Vučić announced the signing of a contract with Tennis for June of that year and an investment of 300 million euros, which included the opening of five farms in Banat and the production of four million pigs at one time. .

However, the contract that was ready to be signed three years ago was never signed, and the justification that the German giant did not come to Serbia because of African swine fever two years ago was described by the national professional public as a weak excuse.

As time goes on, it is increasingly certain that Tennis will not even make it to Serbia, and agroeconomic analyst and journalist Branislav Gulan says it was all politics, and that Tennis thought it could export pork and fattened animals from Serbia to Russia duty free.

“Tennis thought that he could export pork to Russia duty-free, but found out late that he could not do so due to compulsory vaccination. It was only on December 15 last year that compulsory vaccination against swine fever was abolished, and for the meat to be exported, it is known that it takes three years from then, to renew the livestock, “says Gulan and assures that he does not know that if it was a failure of Tennis and his team, or our people did not tell him that, but the fact is that the project was abandoned.

The only concrete thing that reminds us today that tennis was supposed to come to Serbia is the agricultural land in Vojvodina, reserved, among others, for a German investor, and rented by the provincial Secretariat.

Two years ago, due to tennis, which also annoyed the farmers of Vojvodina, the state changed the Agricultural Land Law to allow foreigners to lease 30% of the land in the area of ​​each municipality without tender.

Two years ago, the Banat Farmers Association started a dispute with the Novi Sad Administrative Court about the allocation of state agricultural land to tennis, and won it, but the Secretariat ignored the requests of the Court, which determined that the investors did not they met the requirements of the law and regulations. State farms on long-term lease.

Although they won the first dispute before the Administrative Court based on the fact that the investors do not comply with the references prescribed by the Ministry of Agriculture and the Law of Agricultural Lands, Gulan says that the Provincial Secretariat made the same decision again, although there were no changes. references and do not meet the requirements.

Paori, he notes, is also awaiting a verdict in his favor at the second trial, in which one of the hearings was held yesterday, and they hope to overturn the decision to lease state farmland to Tennis and Food Planet for 30 years.

In announcing the signing of the contract with Tennis for June 2016, Vučić said that the German investor “would initially produce between 700,000 and 800,000 pigs, and in the following years they would reach the figure of four million”.

Vučić also spoke about the investment of 300 million euros, however, according to the contract that Danas had in sight three years ago, which according to officials was never signed, the investor Tennis and the Republic of Serbia committed to cooperate, and the planned investment is 100 million. euros.

The agreement approved an investment for Tenis, which “involves the design, construction and management of five pig farms where each one will have 70,000 pigs with at least 2,500 sows per farm per year (a total of 350,000 pigs in the five farms)”.

The contract also established five locations, but also the lease start date for each of them.

Thus, the start of the land lease in Zrenjanin was first planned for November 2017, for Kikinda for November 2018, the land lease in Sečanj for November 2019, Vršac in November 2020 and finally Plandište, where the plan was to lease in November 2021.

Two years ago, at this time, Tennis again moved the deadlines to come to Serbia, and then the Ministry of Agriculture explained to Danas that the Commission to give consent for investment plans presented a proposal to postpone investment at the request of a company German.

The reason for postponing the investment until further notice, as highlighted by the Ministry, is the appearance of African swine fever in the region, so it “seems that the risk of such investments has multiplied.”

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