Media close to the authorities are once again loudly announcing the start of construction of the much-vaunted Belgrade metro, for which ballerina Aja Jung and TV personality Živorad Nikolić (a.k.a. Žika Šarenica) received tickets back in February 2018, during the SNS pre-election campaign.
The then mayor Siniša Mali, who was transferred in May of that year to the post of Minister of Finance, promised that works would begin as early as 2020 and that the first line would be completed in 2022. Three years after that deadline expired, on 19 December 2025, the French and Serbian governments signed a financial protocol on a loan from the French Treasury worth 150 million euros for the implementation of the project.
On the same day, the Government of Serbia also signed a commercial contract worth almost one billion euros with the French company Alstom for the design and construction of the first metro line from Železnik to Mirijevo, which also includes the purchase of 32 metro trains. Before that, in May, the public utility company Belgrade Metro and Train signed three contracts with the Chinese companies Power China and CCRC Changchun Railway Vehicles for two of their “moles”, TBM machines that are supposed to dig the metro tunnels, the construction of which has been announced since 2014 by the highest state and city officials, from Aleksandar Vučić, Mali, Goran Vesić and Zorana Mihajlović, to Aleksandar Šapić and Andreja Mladenović, director of the public utility company Belgrade Metro and Train. That company was founded back in October 2018, and last year it spent 51 times more money on the salaries of 72 employees than on material, fuel and energy costs.
Did the state sabotage Siemens so it could buy French and Chinese trains?
Although according to the initial announcements, the first metro line was supposed to be completed in 2022, by the end of that year not a single dinar had been paid out from the Serbian budget for the project, while in the previous three years the total cost reached 15.9 billion dinars. Last year, the metro lightened the state coffers by six billion dinars, with 40 per cent of that amount paid out in the final month.
The entire project has been accompanied by numerous controversies and a lack of transparency, which increases suspicions of corrupt arrangements worth several hundred million euros. Even before the contract was officially signed, it was an open secret that the French company Alstom would be engaged on this most important and most expensive infrastructure project in the history of Belgrade, without a public international tender. When the details of the contract were announced, unanswered questions began to pile up in the professional community. Why was another manufacturer not engaged, for example Siemens, the world’s most famous producer of rail vehicles, which incidentally has two factories on the outskirts of Kragujevac, 120 kilometres from Belgrade?
Or why is Serbia paying Alstom one billion euros for 32 metro trains, when seven years ago the London Underground contracted the procurement of 94 metro trains from Siemens for 1.5 billion pounds or 1.7 billion euros? The London Underground thus paid about 18 million euros for each Siemens train with nine carriages for nearly 1,100 passengers, while each Alstom set will cost Serbia 31 million euros. That is 70 per cent more. Per unit!
By coincidence, Alstom also took part in the London tender, but the job went to Siemens, which has a factory in north-east England with 950 employees, around a hundred fewer than in Kragujevac. On that occasion, transport engineer Dragomir Lukić told N1 that Siemens could have produced the trains for the Belgrade metro in Kragujevac, but that it was “sabotaged by the state so that it could buy Chinese and French trains”. He criticises the authorities for not reacting back in 2018, when Siemens bought the domestic company Milanović Inženjering. Lukić believes that construction of an industrial spur line from the factory to the Kragujevac–Lapovo railway should have begun at that time. Had it been built, Serbia would not have had to buy Stadler, Chinese or French trains, Lukić argues, once again expressing suspicion that “the state sabotaged Siemens”.
Siemens management without comment, employees embittered towards the authorities in Serbia and Belgrade
That railway line, which is supposed to connect the two Siemens factories on the outskirts of Kragujevac – one for the production of trams and the other for the production of parts for trains and carriages, locomotive heads and complete trains – with the Kragujevac–Lapovo line, is still under construction, and the works are more than six years behind schedule. Back in December 2018, at the opening of the first plant in Mind Park, in front of several hundred guests, President Vučić told Siemens representatives that he guaranteed the railway for transporting finished rail vehicles would be built. He also promised that he would ask the then mayor of Belgrade to purchase trams from the Kragujevac factory for the needs of the capital.
Meanwhile, the current mayor Šapić did buy them, but from the Turkish company Bozankaya he purchased 25 trams for 63.7 million euros, or 2.7 million euros per unit, excluding VAT. Timișoara, along with Belgrade the only city in Europe to have procured trams from the same manufacturer, paid 1.9 million euros per vehicle, 800,000 euros less than Belgrade. That was not all, because when the first Turkish trams arrived it turned out that they were not only grossly overpriced, but also had a number of defects, and the media reported that one of the four delivered by that point derailed in August.
The management of the Siemens Mobility factory in Kragujevac did not want to comment either on the procurement of trams from Turkey or on the contract for the purchase of metro trains from the French company Alstom. “As a rule, Siemens Mobility does not comment on ongoing tenders, procurement processes, or the activities and/or arrangements of third parties,” the company said in a written response to Radar. Representatives of the employees, however, do not hide their bitterness towards the authorities in Serbia and Belgrade. “Šapić and his associates paid for incompatible Turkish trams between 450,000 and 500,000 euros more per vehicle than they would have cost from Siemens, which produces the highest-quality rail vehicles in the world. I have no doubt that the contract for the purchase of 32 train sets for the Belgrade metro from the French company Alstom was signed according to the same principle,” stresses Nenad Marinković, president of the Independent Trade Union in that company.
He too believes that Siemens has once again been boycotted, even though nearly 1,100 workers are employed in the rail vehicle factories in Kragujevac, of whom, according to union estimates, ten per cent on fixed-term contracts could lose their jobs in the foreseeable future. Siemens, after all, is not immune to the economic crisis, and in such situations every foreign company takes greater care of its factories and workers in its home country. “If the City of Belgrade and the Government of Serbia had bought trams and metro trains from Siemens, we would have secured work for the next five years and would probably have had to hire a certain number of new workers,” Marinković points out.
As it is, there is growing fear that Siemens and other foreign investors in Serbia could leave the country in the next two or three years because of such business arrangements by the state, as well as the increasingly unstable political situation. The situation is further complicated by the constant shifting of deadlines. Two years after Vučić’s promise, in 2020 the Government of Serbia declared the 13.6-kilometre railway line from the Siemens factories to the Kragujevac–Lapovo line a project of strategic importance for the Republic of Serbia, and Vučić himself, during his second visit to Mind Park in July 2022, once again announced the railway connection of Siemens’ factories with the regional line.
Preparatory works began only at the end of September 2024, the construction permit for the entire route was issued in May last year, and the land of residents of Jovanovac, Cvetojevac and other settlements through whose cadastral areas the railway passes was paid just 150 euros per are. Despite this, hardly anyone protested, as the villages of Šumadija have aged and emptied. The railway has therefore finally begun to be built, but it is uncertain whether it will be completed by September, when, as we have learned, joint production of complete trains is due to start at Siemens Mobility factories in Graz, Austria, and Kragujevac.
In the meantime, the state of Serbia and the City of Belgrade, through direct negotiations and without tenders, have purchased or ordered rail vehicles from the Swiss company Stadler, as well as from Turkish, Russian and Chinese companies, and recently also from the French company Alstom. It is therefore unlikely that they will need to buy any additional train sets in the foreseeable future.
All the more so because the then minister Goran Vesić, in May 2024, signed a Memorandum of Understanding and Cooperation with the Chinese company CCRC Changchun Railway Vehicles, which also includes the purchase of nine Chinese trains for speeds of up to 120 kilometres per hour, four of which are due to arrive this year and the remaining five by February next year. In addition, in mid-January the purchase of six new locomotives and nine sleeping carriages for the needs of Srbijavoz by 2028 was announced. From whom and at what price remains to be seen.
(Radar, 02.02.2026)
https://radar.nova.rs/ekonomija/beogradski-metro-vozovi-nabavka-simens/