As of November 1, 106 ticket offices Electric utilities of Serbia ceases to operate, and citizens will be able to pay bills only at the counters in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Niš, Kragujevac and Kraljevo from February 1 next year.
This means that electricity bills will no longer be possible they pay without commission at the cash registers of Elektroprivreda Srbije. Commissions will not be only for those who pay electronically.
Counters for complaints and information will certainly remain available.
According to the EPS, the counters are being abolished due to business improvement, digitization and cost reduction.
Director of the Public Procurement Directorate, Jadranka Ristić, told Euronews Serbia that this decision was completely expected, because a decreasing number of citizens pay their electricity bills at EPS cash registers.
"As many as 87 percent of citizens pay their electricity bills through the 'EPS Uvid u Račun' portal, through commercial banks, the Post of Serbia, and only 13 percent through the cash desks of Elektroprivreda Srbije. From November 1st, the successive cessation of cashier work in EPS branches will begin, which means that from then until January 31st of the following year, only five cashiers will work in the territory of the entire Republic of Serbia, in the five largest cities where the largest number of transaction. These are Belgrade, Novi Sad, Niš, Kragujevac and Kraljevo," she said.
"EPS Account Insight"
She explained that all the employees who work at the cash registers have already been trained and will be assigned to other jobs in order to improve relations with customers. When asked how citizens who are not from these five cities will pay their bills from November 1, he says that EPS works every day to modernize and improve the business system.
"A year ago, Elektroprivreda Srbije offered its customers a new portal, a new mobile application 'EPS Bill Insight', through which customers can download and immediately pay their electricity bill. We currently have over 620.000 users of this app. In the next year, from November 1, 2024 to October 31, 2025, all customers who pay their electricity bill through the 'EPS Bill View' portal will receive a discount of 30 dinars on their next bill."
What should citizens who do not manage well with electronic payments do? Ristić claims that there is a solution for them too.
"Citizens who do not know how to use information technologies will pay their electricity bills at bank counters, postal and other payment institutions, as they do with other bills. Banka Poštanska štedionica offered a significantly lower commission and it will amount to 30 dinars for the next six months, starting from November 1. Elektroprivreda Srbije offers customers an additional discount of 50 dinars for an electronic bill. So, everyone who declares that they want to receive only electronic invoices to their email addresses will receive an additional discount of 50 dinars. In this way, we all contribute to the preservation of the environment together," she said.
Suspicious public-private partnership
However, if the 620.000 users of the "EPS Account Insight" application want to pay their electricity bills that way, they should know exactly where their money is going. That is, who makes money from it.
Namely, as the portal N1 wrote in March and July of this year, EPS - without public procurement - enabled the private company Alta pay to charge a commission for the payment of electricity bills on the website of this public company without investment, and thus potentially every month earn tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of euros.
As this portal found out, the company Alta pay collects a profit of 28,77 dinars from each transaction through this application.
For example, if each of the current 620.000 users paid their bill in this way, Alta Pay would earn 17.837.400 dinars, or about 150.000 euros per month. If every tenth user of the application paid the bill through the application, the partner company Elektroprivreda Srbije would earn about 15.000 euros per month.
Why EPS decided on such a move, what is the benefit for the company and citizens is still not clear, since EPS has not answered questions on this topic so far.
The Office for Public Procurement, which, following a report from the organization Transparency Serbia, carried out monitoring in the EPS, announced that it was determined that the contract concluded between the joint-stock company "Elektroprivreda Srbije" and the company "Alta Pay Group" doo Belgrade does not have the elements of a public procurement contract and that this institution has no basis for further activities, although according to the Law on Public Procurement (Article 179, paragraph three) it is the one that submits the application, request for the protection of rights or "initiates the implementation of other appropriate procedures before the competent authorities when on the basis of monitoring in the event of irregularities in the application of regulations on public procurement".
Well-known owner
The owner of the company Alta Pej is Davor Macura, a businessman close to the Serbian Progressive Party. He became better known to the general public when, at the end of 2021, he and his company ABL Solvent bought the business complex of IMT (Industry of Machines and Tractors) in New Belgrade for around 70,6 million euros.
On the site of the former giant in the production of tractors, the construction of a residential and business complex with more than 5000 apartments and about 150.000 square meters of commercial content is planned. The estimated value of the salary is now around 250 million euros. In this way, this company became the "lucky winner" of the new Law on Planning and Construction, because the mandatory conversion was abolished, so the companies that rented the land without compensation came into its ownership.
As "Vreme" previously reported, Davor Matsura was registered as the owner of a total of 15 companies. His name is often associated with the Serbian Progressive Party, a BIRN wrote about connection between Macura, Milan Radoičić, Nikola Petrović and his wife Zvonko Veselinović. Namely, as BIRN discovered, Milan Radoičić, the informal leader of the northern part of Kosovo, Nikola Petrovic, the godfather of the President of Serbia, and the wife of Radoicic's godfather Zvonka Veselinović acquire valuable new real estate in a prestigious location in Belgrade. Luxury villas are under construction on the ancestral plots of Radoičić and Veselinović's wife, and the common denominator for all these properties is precisely Davor Macura, the owner of Alta Bank.
Sources: Euronews/N1
