Business Leaders Back Student List: Letter Has 170 Signers

An open letter from business owners and entrepreneurs, calling on citizens to vote for the Student List, number 3, in the snap parliamentary election on October 25, now has 170 signatories. The letter, titled “We Believe in a Serbia That Can Do Much More,” was published on the evening of October 21 with more than 40 names. On October 22 the site verujemousrbiju.rs showed a list of 170 signatories, and other business people were invited to add their names.

The signatories stress that they sign in a personal capacity, and that their positions and companies are listed for identification only.

Who signed the business leaders’ letter?

At the top of the list are Nenad Tomasevic, founder and CEO of Dren Bio, Branko Milutinovic, co-founder and CEO of Nordeus and senior vice president at Take-Two Interactive, and Dragan Tomic, vice president of engineering at Databricks and former head of Microsoft’s development center in Serbia.

Others who signed include:

• Ivan Petrovic (Insightful)
• Milica Novkovic (TIM Centar)
• Igor Bogicevic (Deyta.ai)
• Luka Babic (Orgnostica)
• Ivan Stojisavljevic (Nordeus)
• Professor Aleksandar Kuzmanovic of Northwestern University

Biljana Stepanovic, founder of Business Info Group, the publisher of Nova ekonomija, is also among the signatories. Her outlet reported the news of the letter itself.

What do the business leaders say in the letter?

The text opens with six principles, from “We believe in a Serbia where hard work pays off” to “We believe Serbia must not miss this moment.” The letter links the rule of law, education and responsible spending of public money to bigger investment, better-paid jobs and secure pensions.

The signatories draw on their own experience of founding and running companies. They see the students’ demand that institutions do their job as the basis for economic growth, and this is how they write about legal certainty:

The rule of law and legal certainty give people the confidence to invest, hire and plan for the long term.

Reliable institutions, they say, matter to everyone who lives from their work: a farmer, a craftsman and a large company all need clear rules and contracts they can rely on.

In the section on education the business leaders address the state, but they do not name the government. They say a state that wants to win in the age of knowledge cannot be in conflict with its own universities, and add:

If faculties, students and professors are declared enemies of the state, we are heading in a very wrong direction for the future of all of us.

The same section contains the sentence “We believe in a Serbia that conquers the world with knowledge,” along with the observation that a huge number of the best educated and most successful people now create value far from home, and that they should be brought back.

The letter describes responsibility for public money through an image that citizens should be able to see in their everyday lives:

We believe in a state that spends citizens’ money in a way that makes life better.

In the closing section, under the principle that Serbia must not miss this moment, the signatories observe that “those who decide about it have been the same for decades” and that they “have had both the time and the opportunity,” yet Serbia has not become a winner. The letter names no state, party or official.

How does the letter call for a vote?

The letter ends with an explicit appeal: the signatories support the Student List, number 3, and will vote for it on Sunday. They urge citizens to go to the polls on October 25, circle number 3 and join them. The last sentence reads: “The students have shown how much our people can do. It is time for the rest of Serbia to show it too.”

In one day the list grew from more than 40 to 170 names, and the invitation to other business owners to join still stands on the letter’s website.