By: Stefan Marković
PHOTO: CINS
The Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) has for years been financing its work by renting out real estate inherited from the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. Their “tenants” include many municipalities, public companies, and institutions, which is assessed as unacceptable by experts who spoke to CINS.
In the center of Kragujevac, the Dom samoupravljača building from the 1970s is host to the premises of the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). In the same cold-looking concrete building, there is one 35-square-meter office of the City Administration.
This institution rents the space from SPS and, according to the party’s financial reports, paid about 114,000 euros in rent from 2015 until the end of 2020.
This is just one of the pieces of real estate that this party, as the successor of the former League of Communists of Yugoslavia, has at its disposal. According to the latest SPS financial report, they own real estate worth about 13.8 million euros.
Data collected by the Center for Investigative Journalism of Serbia (CINS) and published in its database of party financing show that in the period between 2015 and late 2020, about 2.3 million euros went into SPS’s accounts from the tenants of their business premises. Research has also shown that tenants include numerous public institutions that rent premises from SPS, even though there are vacant city-owned premises.
You can read the whole story on CINS.rs.
This investigative story has been produced with the financial assistance of the European Union, as part of the project ‘PrEUgovor Policy Watch: building alliances for stronger impact in uncertain future’. The contents of this story are the sole responsibility of the authors and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the European Union.