Only three Covid hospitals – in Batajnica, Kruševac and Novi Sad – built since the start of the pandemic in 2020, plus the vaccine factory in Zemun, cost taxpayers more than 180 million euros.
Before its opening, in March 2021, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and the Chinese ambassador Chen Bo stated that the new vaccine factory would be built in line with the highest global standards and would be competitive on an extremely demanding global market. Its true level of competitiveness is evident from the fact that last year it had only five employees, most likely security staff, and that by the beginning of this year it had not generated a single dinar of revenue, according to the financial reports submitted to the Business Registers Agency.
In addition to the vaccine factory in Zemun, the Covid hospital in Kruševac, whose construction cost at least 38 million euros, also stands empty, while the former Covid hospitals in Batajnica and Novi Sad – which cost the state budget 43 and 49 million euros respectively – have been repurposed. The first is now used for palliative care, while both have become dialysis centres operating at far below their projected capacity. It remains unknown how much their adaptation to this new purpose cost, nor how much was paid for the equipment purchased to treat Covid-19 patients. What is known is that the equipment was procured non-transparently, without public tenders, and often at much higher than market prices.
When everything literally collapses
Between 18 and 23 million euros were also wasted on the construction of the so-called Centres of Excellence, including the Centre for Research and the stem cell bank in Kragujevac, depending on the data source consulted. The prospects of the planned scientific and educational activities being organised there were slim even before Friday, 28 November, and are now even slimmer. On that morning, the access road in the immediate vicinity of part of the complex collapsed, adjacent to the construction site of a new residential-commercial building in the Bubanj neighbourhood of Kragujevac.
The Novi Sad-based company InoBačka, which was engaged in the second phase of constructing the Centres of Excellence, stated that the road collapsed due to the failure of a retaining wall on the neighbouring construction site, and that it had informed the Kragujevac construction inspectorate several times, including an urgent call on Thursday before the incident.
The City Administration responded that InoBačka had not sent the relevant inspectorate in Kragujevac any letter, report, photograph, or notification regarding risks, soil undermining, or threats to the stability of the road. It also stated that, on 21 November, the city inspectorate had ordered the immediate suspension of works on the residential building in the immediate vicinity of the Centres of Excellence.
The residential-commercial building whose construction site borders the Centres of Excellence complex is being built by the Kragujevac company RP Invest 1980, which, as it turned out, had authorisation for preparatory works but not a building permit for the multi-storey structure. It remains unclear how the city construction inspectorate learned only on 21 November that RP Invest 1980 lacked a building permit, and how it failed to notice that a seven- or eight-storey building had sprung up next to the Centres of Excellence.
In any case, the collapse will almost certainly have a legal epilogue, as the competent national authorities have announced criminal charges against those responsible for the incident, in which, fortunately, apart from extensive material damage, there were no other consequences. There were none because no one was on site at the moment of the collapse, as the site had been closed seven days earlier, and the Centres of Excellence had already stood empty for a full two years before the incident. It is now certain that they will not be used for their intended purpose for a long time.
Symbols of irresponsible planning and even more irresponsible spending of public money
When the roughly 20 million euros for the Centres of Excellence are added to the 180 million euros spent on the three Covid hospitals and the vaccine factory, missed investments in Serbian healthcare over just the past four and a half years amount to 200 million euros. And they are surely much higher, as there were undoubtedly other failures.
The hospital in Kruševac is a monument to the future and will speak to the deeds we undertook in a short time for our people. I am proud of Serbia, of the people who worked here in Kruševac, and in four months, just as in Batajnica, completed something that looks magnificent. They worked day and night and did a great job… This is what remains for Kruševac and Serbia, said Vučić on 20 December 2020 at the opening of the Kruševac Covid hospital.
He likely never suspected that just five years later, in late November 2025, it would truly resemble a monument – not to the future, but to the past – as it is padlocked, eerily empty, and has become a symbol of political voluntarism, irresponsible planning and even more irresponsible spending of Serbian taxpayers’ money. The hospital in Kruševac falls under the University Clinical Centre in Niš, and vascular surgeon and opposition councillor Dragan Milić recently noted that guards stand dutifully outside it, a padlock hangs on the entrance door, and the hospital is a monument to stupidity and political arrogance.
Although the last Covid patient from the hospital in Batajnica, which was also opened on 20 December 2020, was discharged in June 2023, it was only in July this year that it became the Palliative Care Centre of the University Clinical Centre of Serbia. In the facility built to accommodate 200 patients in intensive care and around 800 in semi-intensive care, only about 50 patients have been treated, and in the middle of last month the hospital in Batajnica also received a Haemodialysis Department, with a maximum capacity of 72 patients per day.
In other words, nearly 90 per cent of bed capacity is still unused. On top of that, patients who need haemodialysis claim that this is a disastrous solution for most of them, since some therapies last four to five hours, not counting the several hours needed to travel from Belgrade to the hospital in Batajnica and back.
The vaccine factory was pointless from the moment the foundation stone was laid
More than four years ago, on 4 September 2021, Health Minister Zlatibor Lončar said that the second quarter of the following year was the deadline for completing the new vaccine factory, whose foundation stone was laid five days later, on 9 September, in the Zemun neighbourhood of Soko Salaš. Instead of 30 million, as was initially announced, construction of the factory cost 47.6 million euros, Nova ekonomija reported, and no one has since disputed this information. In December 2023, the City of Belgrade allocated an additional 423,000 euros for this project, even though the World Health Organization had declared an end to the Covid-19 pandemic in May of the same year.
As with earlier state-involved projects, no public tender was announced; instead, all work was contracted through direct agreements with the construction companies.
In December 2021, the Government of Serbia and the Abu Dhabi-based company Hayat Biotech established a joint venture, Life Biotech, in which the Serbian state holds 33 per cent, while the majority share of 67 per cent belongs to the company co-owned by China’s Sinopharm and UAE-based GROUP 42. A further curiosity is that the factory in Zemun is classified in official documentation as a military facility, or a facility of special purpose. The Ministry of Defence engaged the private company Termomont for its construction, the same firm that built all three Covid hospitals.
Warnings from experts, including epidemiologist Zoran Radovanović, that a Sinopharm vaccine factory was a completely pointless and misguided state investment carried no weight. He noted that it was doomed from the moment its construction was announced, because the global market already had sufficient vaccine supplies at the time, meaning there would be no shortages and no realistic prospect of selling the vaccines later to third parties.
Kragujevac’s never-ending project
Equally intriguing is the construction of the Centres of Excellence, with the stem cell research centre and the National Stem Cell Bank in Kragujevac. Two years ago, in mid-November 2023, former Prime Minister Ana Brnabić claimed in Kragujevac that they would be opened in April or May of the following year, that 18 million euros had been invested in the 11,500-square-metre facilities, and that the Government was frustrated by the lengthy construction, comparing it to a never-ending project,.
She also said that a tender for equipment and furnishings would be announced in November 2023, but this has still not happened nearly two years later. The newly constructed buildings have stood empty for almost two years, opposite the Rectorate of the University of Kragujevac, whose leadership remains silent on the matter.
They may not need to speak now, as it is unknown how much time and money will be required to repair the damage caused by the collapse of soil and a retaining wall on the road adjacent to the complex. The Academic Forum has stated that the collapse of the new road in Kragujevac is a new red alert for all citizens of Serbia and a warning that unless something is urgently and seriously changed in the country, anyone may fall victim to ignorance, incompetence, arrogance, and corrupt practices in the conclusion and execution of construction works.
Recalling that no one has yet been held responsible for the collapse of the canopy in Novi Sad that killed 16 people, the statement emphasises that it is therefore not surprising that construction works continue to be carried out against professional standards, for how else can one explain a brand-new road collapsing completely after the first slightly heavier rain?
Even without this incident, there were already numerous indications that the Centres of Excellence were yet another story marked by disorder, irresponsibility, and corruption. It all began back in March 2011, when Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and Technological Development Božidar Đelić signed a protocol with then-Mayor of Kragujevac Veroljub Stevanović and Dean of the Medical Faculty in Kragujevac Nebojša Arsenijević for the construction and equipping of the Stem Cell Research Centre and the National Stem Cell Bank. According to the protocol, everything was supposed to be completed by the end of 2012, and the centre and bank were to be headed by world-renowned geneticist Miodrag Stojković, who was effectively driven out of Kragujevac four years ago.
Thirteen years after the original deadline, there is still no indication of when these centres will become operational. The foundation stone was laid nearly a decade ago, on 25 January 2016, by then-President Tomislav Nikolić. Some local portals, citing University of Kragujevac sources, reported that the centres might open this year, but no one at the University was willing to confirm this for Radar.
Insiders say they remain silent because they have nothing to say – they themselves do not know when the Centres of Excellence will open. Nor do they know where they will find the additional seven to eight million euros needed to procure equipment and furnishings, as all 18 million euros from the European Investment Bank loan have been spent on constructing the building and on salaries for staff at the Government’s Project Management Unit. It is not unlikely that the recent landslide at the neighbouring construction site will now be used as an excuse for all the missed deadlines for which they themselves are responsible.
(Radar, 01.12.2025)
https://radar.nova.rs/ekonomija/investicije-u-zdravstvu-bez-epiloga/