From ABC to Z

The story about the bankrupts proceedings against a printing house which journalists still continue to call Glas has many interesting aspects, with one conclusion suggesting itself beyond any doubt: the entire bankruptcy proceeding carried out by Belgrade's Commercial Court have the single objective of putting the only private printing house in Belgrade with a significant capacity for printing newspapers, under state control.

No element of this sad and complicated story is worth ignoring, but the extent of the violent implementation of "justice" in ABC Grafika is bringing the Belgrade printed media into a position in which in the future they will only be able to publish their publications in printing houses over which the state can have full control, should it need to.  And the way things stand - it will need to do so!

This likely ultimate objective of the entire bankruptcy proceedings is revealed to us by Milena Arezin, President of the Belgrade's Commercial Court: in her interview for Politika daily on February 2 she wonders how legal the privatization of the former Glas was.  It occurred ten years ago, and Belgrade's Commercial Court appears ready for archeological investigations in this case in order to prove that the defunct public enterprise Glas had been illegally privatized, although in the meantime it had become one of the most respectable printing houses in Serbia.  There is no evidence that anyone filed a complaint during those ten years because Glas was privatized, but the court seems heedless of this.

The formal reasons for the bankruptcy proceedings are irregular financial records which resulted from the fact that the creditors of ABC Grafika did not consider bankruptcy as inevitable, believing that they will manage to collect on their credit in the amount of 90 million dinars.  The biggest creditor in the proceedings is the company ABC Produkt, with all of the equipment listed in the bankruptcy proceedings being owned by that very same company.  You will admit that the whole situation sounds slightly absurd: the Commercial Court is taking control of the property owned by a company whose interests it is supposed to protect.  That is to say, the Court should protect the creditor's interests, so that it is illogical for the Court to appropriate equipment owned by the creditor of the company against which bankruptcy proceedings are being carried out.  All the illogical circumstances appearing in this proceeding have one clear explanation: the state will not allow a private printing house to operate when that same printing house also becomes the publisher of the daily newspaper Glas javnosti, whose circulation and influence are hardly negligible.

The bankruptcy official hired people from Protect Team to oversee the appropriated property.  They broke into the building in 8 Velickovic Street without the proper papers or authorization and with weapons for which they did not have the proper licence.  Since that moment the case is progressively worsening, with printing house workers despairing because the bankrupts official told them that they will all be fired, even though he told them several days earlier that none of them will lose their jobs.  In the meantime a shooting incident occurred which probably resulted from arrogance and insufficient professionalism on the part of the security personnel brought in to "guard" the printing house, of course at the expense of those same workers who could have been hurt when the young lads from the Protect Team tried playing with their guns.

On Wednesday, at about 6 p.m. this issue of VREME will also go into print at the same printing house discussed in this article.  For the first time in the nine months that we have been working with these people, we are not sure whether VREME will go into circulation on Thursday.  VREME's Editorial Office undertook measures to protect its interests and the interests of its readers, but we would not like to part with our friends the printers in this way.  There is growing fear that the whole of Serbia will soon be under bankruptcy proceedings and that we will all be guarded by some security personnel who will pass their time by playing with their guns.