Election campaign: Coupon for a vote?
Political parties receive different forms of support from the private sector during election campaigns, but this form is more than unusual. The private company Cerena Trade from Sombor is giving its buyers coupons for a discount on fuel, which are actually promotion slips of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). The local chapter of the party has avoided to comment.
The co-owner of Cerena Trade, Živojin Šarčanski told the Insajder.net the coupon is authentic. He said his motives were patriotic and out of desire to help the inhabitants of Sombor, but also the Serbian Progressive Party. He claimed that he expected nothing in return, nor had he been promised something. He did not want us to record his statement, but agreed with it being retold.
Šarčanski said that he had organized the distribution of the coupons in agreement with the local officials of the Serbian Progressive Party, and that he had not officially reported this form of the donation to the party. He pointed out that he was not a member of SNS, but a sympathizer. As he explained, he printed the coupons and took them to the local chapter of the party, so that they could distribute them to the citizens.
Anyone who brings the coupon to his gas station gets a discount of seven dinars per liter of fuel and five percent on oils, lubricants and car-care products.
"When someone buys 10 liters of fuel, they save 70 dinars. That is not a little. That's two loaves of bread nowadays," Šarčanski said.
The co-owner of Cerena Trade claimed that he gave similar donations in fuel in the previous period, for the Democratic Party.
Coupons "in agreement with local SNS"
The co-owner of Cerena Trade said that his company had printed the discount coupons in agreement with the commissioner of the Serbian Progressive Party for Sombor, Slobodan Stanić. The man who answered Stanić's phone when we called, hung up immediately. When we repeated the call, another man answered, saying that he did not know Stanić and had no connections with SNS.
We have tried to reach Slobodan Stanić on the phone at the party chapter in Sombor, but were told that he was not in the office. We left a message, asking him to call us back and explaining what the subject was, with a question about whether the coupons of the Cerena Trade company had been reported as a donation from a private company to the party, since parties were obliged to report every donation.
Success of the Cerena Trade company
Cerena Trade is a company which had ten employees in the period from 2011 to the end of 2014. According to data in the Agency for Commercial Registers, it has three gas stations - one each in Sombor, Čonoplja and Bački Monoštor.
Its income grew from around eight million euros in 2011 to 11 million in 2013. According to the financial report for 2014, its income fell to around five million euros.
The company was founded in 2001, with Živojin Šarčanski as the sole owner. According to current information, his stake is 20 percent and the majority belongs to Marija Pejović, a citizen of Montenegro.
The media in Sombor reported about the opening of the gas station in Bački Monoštor on April 4th last year. The opening was attended by the mayor of Sombor, a member of SNS, Saša Todorović, who cut the ribbon, and the deputy mayor and member of the City Council for agriculture, rural development and environment protection.
The investment of Cerena Trade was worth 120,000 euros and it announced that it would employ two people.
In 2012, the company purchased a facility in the industrial zone in Sombor and invested 400,000 euros into a plant for the recycling of waste oils. At the opening of the gas station in 2015, Sombor Mayor Saša Todorović thanked the owner for the courage to invest into a gas station and promised that the city administration would help in solving the problems regarding the start of operations of the recycling factory.
First on the list of exporters into Kosovo
It is interesting that Cerena Trade was one of the companies which have exported oil into Kosovo. As Insajder reported in the series "Patriotic Looting", since the Serbian government abolished VAT for goods going to Kosovo in 2005, one of the biggest businesses was the exporting of fuels, with many exporters returning the fuel back to Serbia after the tax refund and profiting from the huge price difference.
In 2012, Insajder obtained data about the biggest exporters, according to the Law on the availability of information. In 2010, when the turnover in oil was increasing, little known companies started entering the business. In that year, Cerena Trade from Sombor was at the top of the list of biggest exporters into Kosovo, with the turnover of 6.5 million euros. The company had only two employees at that time.