Serbia expects EUR 400 mln from sale of its biggest airportBelgrade, 5 December 2016 (MIA) - Serbia expects to raise 400 million euros ($428 million) in the privatisation of its biggest airport, Belgrade's Nikola Tesla, Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said on Monday.
Once closed to international air traffic during a decade of war and sanctions under late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, Belgrade's passenger numbers rose sharply after Abu Dhabi's state-owned airline Etihad bought a 49 percent stake in national airline JAT in 2013, renaming it Air Serbia.
"We could even get 600 million euros if we give it in concession for a longer period," Vucic told reporters after meeting the European Union's enlargement commissioner Johannes Hahn, Reuters reports.
Serbia is under pressure to move ahead with privatisations from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund under the terms of a 1.2 billion-euro IMF loan.
Airports in Europe are often seen as attractive infrastructure investments thanks to expected passenger growth and dense populations and several privatisations are on the cards.
Bulgaria expects to bring about 1.2 billion levs ($656 million) into state coffers by selling a 35 year concession to operate its state-owned Sofia airport, which has slightly fewer passengers than Belgrade but is growing faster.
Passenger traffic at Nikola Tesla airport grew 3.8 percent to 4.6 million last year, while Sofia passenger numbers grew 9 percent to 3.8 million.
Shares in Aerodrom Nikola Tesla - of which the state holds 83.15 percent - are down 4 percent this year, trading at 1,100 dinars on Monday and giving the company a market value of 38 billion Serbian dinars ($331 million).
In the first nine months of this year, Nikola Tesla airport reported a net profit of 2.4 billion dinars, a 13 percent increase compared with last year.
The government will have to compete for investment with other airports in the region.
Among those planning to bid for Sofia airport are Turkey's Limak Holding, Russia's VTB Capital and Switzerland's Flughafen Zuerich, a source familiar with the process told Reuters last month before the process was delayed for a second time.
Germany's Fraport is also buying 14 regional airports in Greece.
And France is also among European countries raising cash from airport privatisations to help meet budget deficit targets, selling 60 percent stakes in Nice Cote d'Azur and Lyon-Saint-Expury, for almost 1.8 billion euros. lk/17:19
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Bosnian Serb commander Mladic central to Srebrenica genocide: prosecutors
The Hague, 5 December 2016 (MIA) - Former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic was a central figure in the 1995 massacre of thousands of Muslims from Srebrenica, prosecutors told judges at his genocide trial on Monday.
Prosecutors were making their closing arguments in Mladic's trial, the last major war crimes case at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which is winding down after more than 20 years prosecuting the ethnic warfare that accompanied the 1990s collapse of Yugoslavia, Reuters reports.
Prosecutor Alan Tieger told judges at the Tribunal that rather than the "marginalised figure" his defence attorney made him out to be, Mladic helped orchestrate the killings,
"Mladic walked into Srebrenica and vowed that the time had come to take revenge on the Turks," Tieger said of the massacre, in which 8,000 Muslim men and boys, some as young as 12, were "systematically slaughtered".
Mladic, 74, faces up to life imprisonment on two counts of genocide and nine counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Hearings are due to conclude on December 15 and a judgement is likely in 2017.
"The cleansing campaign tore apart non-Serb families and communities and left behind destroyed mosques and Catholic churches, the burned-out and empty shells of Bosnian Muslim villages and mass graves," adsded prosecutor Arthur Traldi.
Mladic, frail from a series of strokes when he was arrested in 2011, was alert, listening intently and occasionally wiping his brow with a handkerchief as prosecutors spoke.
"If Mladic hadn't come to Srebrenica my son Nermin, whose birthday it is today, would still be alive," said Munira Subasic, one of a group of grieving relatives gathered outside the court in The Hague.
Mladic was charged alongside former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, who was sentenced to 40 years in prison in March. Prosecutors say they masterminded a conspiracy to carve an 'ethnically pure' Serbian state out of Bosnia.
Tieger quoted Mladic as telling the Bosnian Serb assembly in 1994 they had an historic opportunity to create "not any kind of state, but an all-Serb state with as few enemies as possible".
Karadzic and Mladic were indicted shortly before the end of Bosnia's war, which claimed up to 100,000 lives, but spent more than a decade on the run in Serbia before their arrest.
Established in 1993, the tribunal indicted 161 individuals from all sides of the conflict and 83 have been convicted. lk/17:23
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UN refugee chief fears for EU-Turkey deal
Berlin, 5 December 2016 (MIA) - The head of the U.N. refugee agency is concerned that refugees could suffer if the European Union's migrant deal with Turkey is "hijacked" by political concerns.
U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi told The Associated Press Monday that he hopes refugees do "not get hijacked by all the rest."
The EU has offered Turkey visa-free travel for Turkish citizens, fast-track EU membership talks and billions of euros for Syrian refugees if it stops migrants coming to Europe.
While refugee arrivals in Greece have slowed significantly, tensions between Ankara and Brussels are high over delays on easing visa restrictions and the slow pace of membership talks.
Grandi said linking refugees' futures to Turkey's EU concerns "makes it somehow conditional to other issues that are more complicated and difficult." lk/19:17
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Amnesty: Around half a million displaced in south-east Turkey
Istanbul, 6 December 2016 (MIA) - Turkish authorities have expelled about half a million people from their homes in the country‘s south-east, human rights organization Amnesty International has accused, dpa reports.
According to a report Amnesty published Tuesday, inhabitants of the region have been forcibly evicted from their homes within the last year as a result of tactics tantamount to "collective punishment."
The report focused particularly on Sur quarter in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir. In Sur alone, around 24,000 people have relinquished their homes and left the district due largely to the curfews imposed by the authorities, the report said.
Sur has been the site of battles between the banned Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) and security forces since the July 2015 collapse of a two-year ceasefire between the group and the Turkish state.
Suffering from shortages of food and water, and fearing for their lives in the continual fighting, many took advantage of the short window of time between curfews to flee.
In March, the authorities expropriated most of the land in Sur, according to Amnesty. ik/09:21
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Eurozone agrees debt relief for Greece amid IMF row
Brussels, 6 December 2016 (MIA) - Eurozone finance ministers on Monday approved new debt relief measures to relieve Greece's colossal debt mountain in the wake of its huge 86-billion-euro bailout, but at levels far short of those demanded by the IMF, AFP reports.
"The Eurogroup endorsed today the full set of short-term measures" including extending the repayment period and an adjustment to interest rates, the eurozone's 19 finance ministers said in a statement.
The ministers accorded Athens the small measures to reduce Greece's debt as a reward for completing the latest round of reforms demanded in the country's massive bailout programme -- its third since 2010.
"We will start implementing them in the next weeks," said Klaus Regling, the head of the European Stability Mechanism, the eurozone's bailout fund.
However the ministers refused to officially sign off on the bailout's second review as expected, telling Athens that there still remained a few open questions on Greece's reform efforts.
The talks were marred by a row with the International Monetary Fund, as Europe and the fund remain as far apart as ever on the level of need for debt relief measures.
This is a crucial demand for the fund to back the bailout programme in which for now it plays only a technical role.
The hardline stance on debt relief by the ministers, led by Germany's powerful Wolfgang Schaeuble, comes as key elections approach next year in Germany and the Netherlands, where bailout fatigue is running rife with voters.
The IMF played a major part in two earlier rescues for Greece but balked at the 86-billion-euro third in 2015 because it said Athens would never get back on its feet unless its mountain of debt was cut outright.
The so-called "short-term" measures announced by the ministers crucially do not include reduction of the face value of the debt, an idea that is firmly opposed by the eurozone governments.
Instead, the highly technical measures include extending maturities on certain loans and locking in the interest rate on some debt that risks future interest-rate increases.
"It's very important for all sides, including the IMF, to not jeopardise this progress with increased uncertainty," said Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos.
Already huge, Greece's debt is on path grow to 315 billion euros ($334 billion) or around 180 percent of output this year, according to the latest EU data.
The issue turns on a key figure -- 3.5 percent, the primary balance, or the surplus on the public finances before debt repayments, that Greece is supposed to reach.
The target is very high -- and most countries do not even come close -- but Germany believes it is the only way to solve the Greek issue once and for all and wants Athens to keep the pace for 10 years after the end of the current bailout in 2018.
"Some have argued for three years, some for five and some for 10," Eurogroup head Jeroen Dijsselbloem told reporters after the talks.
"In all those situations serious structural reforms are necessary to reach that 3.5 percent and maintain it for some years," he added.
For the IMF, that option is totally unrealistic -- an economy with an already unsustainable debt burden cannot be expected to tighten the screws further.
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