Serbian Opposition Seeks End to UAE Agreement

Serbia's opposition Democratic Party, DS, has filed a draft law seeking termination of the agreement on cooperation between Belgrade and the United Arab Emirates, UAE, signed in February 2013, claiming it is unconstitutional and damages the public interest.

Balsa Bozovic, the MP who submitted the bill, told BIRN that the agreement allows for non-transparent private deals between Serbia's ruling Progressive Party and UAE companies which is against Serbia's legal order.

"The only proper thing to do is to terminate the agreement because it completely breaks the legal order of Serbia and puts the UAE partners of the Serbian Progressive Party into a privileged position on the market," Bozovic said on Thursday. "The whole legal order is suspended that way," he added.

In 2014, the party asked Serbia's Constitutional Court to determine whether the law on the agreement between the two countries met constitutional provisions, but the court has not ruled on the issue as yet.

Bozovic also proposed scrapping the law that determines the expropriation procedures and the issue of building permits for the realization of the Waterfront project.

In November 2015 he filed a criminal complaint against Infrastructure Minister Zorana Mihajlovic who that April signed the contract between the UAE-based company Eagle Hills and the Serbian government for the project.

"The prosecution office told me that they could not do anything about it because the damage [from the Waterfront project] would be determined only in 30 years' time when the project is finished … by which time my complaint will be outdated, so they have secured themselves on both sides," Bozovic told BIRN on Thursday.

The state-backed project has bitterly divided the Serbian public in...