Belgrade Gets 1.14 Billion Dinars From State Since July
From July to mid-September, Belgrade received 1.14 billion dinars in three transfers from the national budget, ahead of a third rebalance on October 5 and elections on October 25.
Belgrade received about 1.14 billion dinars, roughly 9.7 million euros, from the national budget between the start of July and mid-September 2026, earmarked solely for keeping the city’s day to day finances liquid. The money arrived through three separate transfers, the last and largest of them on September 16, just as the city budget, already increased to more than 202 billion dinars, heads toward its third rebalance of the year.
The first two transfers, about 143 million dinars combined (120 million plus 23 million), were approved through decisions published in early July. The third and far larger one, 995.875 million dinars, was approved on September 16. That figure does not include the separate 1.2 billion dinars the city received earlier in the year specifically for metro construction.
Belgrade’s biggest infrastructure projects, in fact, are not funded from the city budget at all but from the national one, and are treated as state projects: the metro, the new bridge over the Sava, EXPO, the National Stadium and the rail line linking Zemun Polje to the National Stadium. That raises the question of why the city, on top of that funding, still needs to ask for extra money just to remain liquid.
Why a third budget rebalance is coming
Nikola Jovanovic, director of the Centre for Local Self-Government, says the third rebalance of Belgrade’s budget this year will come on October 5, exactly twenty days before the parliamentary elections scheduled for October 25. He says the city’s public utility companies currently owe suppliers 30 billion dinars combined, naming the public transport operator GSP Belgrade, the district heating company Beogradske elektrane and the road maintenance firm Beograd put as the biggest debtors. The latest list of the fifty biggest debtors of the state power utility EPS (Elektroprivreda Srbije) and the state gas company Srbijagas also includes the Belgrade Waterworks and Sewerage company and the public utility JPKP Lazarevac.
Jovanovic says the scale of the debt is not just the result of poor planning but of systemic corruption in how the companies are run:
The cost of works is artificially inflated, the same jobs get done more than once, tenders are rigged, and party loyalists get hired. Management is disastrous, most public utility companies are run by unqualified people holding illegal acting director status, and in many of them the directors are party officials, which is banned under the Law on Public Enterprises.
Jovanovic adds that most of the billion dinars from the latest transfer will go toward overdue salaries and severance payments for employees of Apoteke Beograd (Belgrade Pharmacies), a company Srpske Novine has written about before: at the time, Apoteke Beograd paid out sixteen overdue salaries while part of its other obligations remained unsettled.
Economist Nikola Radin, executive director of the organization Beograd u pokretu (Belgrade in Motion), says a third rebalance within a single year is the clearest sign of how poorly the city budget was planned. Asked what the billion dinars the Republic recently transferred will actually be spent on, he says the decision to transfer the money speaks for itself:
Until we see the rebalance proposal, we can’t responsibly say exactly which items the money will be allocated to, but the facts are very worrying: the budget has already been changed twice, it was increased to more than 202 billion dinars, and then the Republic had to step in again because of the risk to the city’s current liquidity.
Radin adds that the money is not going toward new investments but toward keeping the city running day to day:
This isn’t money for a new bridge, a school or a kindergarten, it’s a financial injection so the city can meet its obligations.
He says the public deserves a precise answer on where every dinar of the transfer will end up, and that the underlying problem goes beyond a single decision to provide aid:
When the Republic has to help a city whose budget exceeds 200 billion dinars stay liquid, it’s no longer enough to say there’s a problem, someone has to establish how that problem came about.
The question stays open until October 5, when the City Assembly is due to adopt its third budget rebalance of the year, exactly twenty days before Belgrade, the city with the most registered voters in the country, votes in the parliamentary elections on October 25.
