Serbian State News Agency Works On Despite Shutdown

Tanjug has continued to work despite being deleted from the national media registry and having no permit to operate after being officially shut down following a failed privatisation effort, raising suspicions about who is now behind it.

According to the Serbian State Treasury Administration, from the shutdown on October 31 last year until March 16 this year, Tanjug received 335,000 euros from the budget, and the agency's website has continued producing news.

Tanjug's management claims that this is residual money which the state still owes the agency from last year.

It insists the news agency has not received any other payments from the state since October 2015.

"We are not going to defend ourselves over the fact that we have not closed after the state stopped financing us," Tanjug's management statement on Saturday.

But it did not disclose why it is still open and whether it has a new owner or not.

BIRN contacted both Tanjug and the Ministry of Culture and Information, but received no responses.

Rade Veljanovski, a media expert at the Political Science Faculty at Belgrade University, told BIRN that he believed Tanjug was still working as a "phantom agency" for the government.

"This is absolutely illegal behaviour by the state. Privatisation has failed, which means Tanjug's existence does not have any legal basis," Veljanovski said.

"Now Tanjug is again the regime's unofficial news agency," he added.

A Tanjug journalist speaking on condition of anonymity told BIRN that "it is not permitted to speak about the situation" at the news agency.

Last August, the government led by the Serbian Progressive Party adopted a Law on Information and the Media that provided for the withdrawal of the state from media...