For five to six hours a day, in the first two weeks of the month, Elektrodistribucija workers do work - which is not theirs. They go from house to house and read electricity meters, because the tender by which this service should be performed was rejected for the second time.
This bizarre situation works because all workers get a quota and the deadline is until the middle of the month to do it, the sources of "Vremena" describe. It is irrelevant whether the worker came to EDS as an economist or an electrician, all except the privileged ones go to the field, and many have to go on weekends to read meters because they do not arrive during the working week. Even though there is a quota that every worker must fulfill, if he completes it before the deadline, according to the good old Serbian custom, he also gets the work that his colleague did not finish.
So those first two weeks in electrical distribution seem completely crazy. The counters and only some people from finance remain working in the company. The atmosphere, they say, is quite miserable, and most people say that it has never been worse. This is very important, if you take into account that among these employees there are many who support, or in the last ten years have been very supportive of, Vučić.
From October 5, 2024 until today, Elektrodistribucija failed to choose the companies that will read the electricity used to citizens, and all the tenders of companies connected to the state were rejected by a former close associate of Bratislava Gašić - Ljubomir Subara.
The whole mess is especially important because every now and then consumers receive incorrectly read electricity bills, as was the case this January. As if out of spite, those accounts end up grossly wrong and transferred to the red zone.
We will pay you, believe me.
Dissatisfaction is fueled by the fact that, month after month, workers are promised that they will stop reading the meters, because the tender will pass. Another option that was mentioned to them is that they will start paying them extra for this work. But neither the tender was passed nor the additional salary arrived. Thus, the employees of these state-owned companies, among whom the leading ones are those who are used to the pace of work in the state-owned business, are angry afterwards and may even disobey.
A large part of people, between 70 and 80 percent, do the reading work themselves, while the rest - pay someone to do it for him. Sources in the newsroom say that the directors mostly know about it, but they turn their heads, because they themselves don't know what to do about this issue.
Dane Shijan vs. Bratislav Gasic
First, the meter reading job was assigned to a company Marko Bosanac, who "became famous" by chanting "Aco Srbina" at SNS rallies, and years ago he read electricity to Serbia.
The Bosnian was officially expelled from dealing with meters, due to complaints from the company "Đerdap Usluge", where Ljubomir Šubara is the director. Those who followed the long course of shutdowns and sales of state-owned companies in Serbia remember him as the man who announced around 2015 that he would be the "last director of the Privatization Agency." He is very close to Bratislav Gašić, the current Minister of Defense of Serbia. While Gašić was the mayor of Kruševac, and Šubara was the representative of the state capital in the FAM Lubricant Factory in the same city, they collaborated separately.
"It is true that we are friends, but I am not from Kruševlja, as the media write, but a native of Dorćol," Šubara said at the time.
Then this job was taken over by Dane Šijan, a former athlete, who publicly supported SNS. For his company, which provides security services, the media wrote that during the elections in December 2023, it brought "phantom voters" from Republika Srpska to the Belgrade local elections.
They don't give in.
New tenders were announced, but the same thing happened again. Among the employees of Elektrodistribucija, there are stories that Gašić's electricity does not give up and that he goes to every tender for meters with an offer lower than several hundred million dinars and thus defeats the tender.
Although Elektrodistribucija chose Šijan's company, "Đerdap usluge" rejected the tender because they proved that their price was incomparably lower. Now, EDS won't give Gasic a job, and he is deliberately denying it to Šijan. It is mentioned that an even more serious player from the political and business underground, who is fruitfully cooperating with the regime, has now entered the whole story and on Shijan's side.
"Vreme" tried several times to contact the company "Đerdap Usluge", by email and phone, and the employees were always polite. However, they never responded to calls for an interview.
