Sinisa Mali: Diesel Would Cost 284 Dinars Without Tax Cut
Serbia's finance minister says a liter of diesel would cost 284 dinars instead of 236 without the 25% excise cut, and compares the average wage in 2012 and today.
Finance Minister Sinisa Mali posted a calculation on Instagram showing that a liter of diesel in Serbia would cost 284 dinars (~2.4 EUR) without the reduced excise duties, instead of the current 236 dinars (~2.0 EUR). That is 48 dinars, or about 20% more. He also compared how many times an average wage could fill a fuel tank in 2012 and today. Euro amounts are converted at roughly 117 dinars to the euro.
We previously reported that fuel excise duties are lowered until October 25 and that diesel costs 236 dinars. Mali now claims how much fuel would cost without that measure.
What did Mali say about the price of diesel?
He accompanied the post with a text in which he states:
In 2012, one average salary could fill a full tank of fuel five times, and today an average salary does it as many as 10 times.
Mali wrote this in the video caption, and closed the same sentence with the words “twice as much, despite the big crisis and conflicts in the world.” He then turned to fuel prices. “The price of diesel in Serbia today is 236 dinars and that is a lot, I know,” Mali said, attributing the rise to the conflict between the US and Iran in the Persian Gulf and the jump in crude oil prices. He laid out the calculation without the government measure like this:
But if we had not cut the excise duties on fuel by 25%, as we did, the market price of a liter of diesel in Serbia today would be exactly 284 dinars. That is how much citizens do not pay today, given that the state has taken appropriate measures
By his figures, the excise cut currently saves a driver 48 dinars on every liter of diesel.
How does Mali compare the 2012 wage with today’s?
The comparison rests on two average wages. According to B92, Mali puts the average wage in Serbia for 2012 at about 41,000 dinars (~350 EUR), and for July 2026, the latest available figure, at 121,400 dinars (~1,036 EUR). Novosti also cites the 121,400 dinar figure from Mali’s remarks. His message builds on that:
Prices are rising everywhere, the only question is whether your salary is rising faster than prices
Mali called this a better standard of living and a policy under which wages rise more than the prices the state, as he put it, could not influence.
Can the five to ten ratio be checked?
Not from the statement alone. Mali gives neither the size of the tank nor the price of a liter of diesel in 2012, and those two numbers determine how many times a tank can be filled. What his figures do allow is a comparison of wages: 121,400 divided by 41,000 gives about 2.96, so the wage in dinars has risen almost threefold. If a tank can now be filled twice as often as then, rather than three times as often, that would mean diesel has become roughly half again as expensive in the meantime. This is our own calculation on rounded numbers, not Mali’s claim, and it only shows what his figures would imply.
