Air Serbia starts operations October 26th – EC warns that Serbian airline may lose its open skies license

Sinisa Mali, an advisor to the first deputy prime minister of Serbia, has denied the information that there are any problems with the guarantee that the Serbian government plans to use, through the Development Fund, to secure its stake in Air Serbia as well as the fact that Economy Minister Sasa Radulovic refused to sign these guarantees.

- The guarantee is signed and will be on the agenda for today’s meeting of the Serbian government – Mali said to today’s Blic, denying that there were any difficulties with the guarantee.

The Government of Serbia believes that Air Serbia will start operating October 26th, although in early August the European Commission warned that Air Serbia could lose its open skies license because Etihad took over the management of our new company, Blic reports.

As Blic reports, Sinisa Mali does not hide that the Civil Aviation Directorate received a warning letter from the EC general manager for mobility and transport, which states an option that the new company can lose the open skies license because the management of the new company is in the hands of a non-EU company.

As Danas reports “the attention of this commission has recently been drawn by the newspaper information that Etihad is preparing to take over a 49% stake in Jat. Apart from that, Etihad is expected to take over the management of Jat Airways. Etihad's stake in Jat is in line with the ECAA contract…This is not the case when it comes to effective control of Jat, which will obviously be in the hands of a state that is not an ECAA member. This kind of situation would be contradictory to the given regulations, meaning that Serbia would not be able to adopt to ECCA contract provisions until the rules for managing Jat are changed or its license revoked, it is stated in the letter that the EC sent to the Civil Aviation Directorate.

The Commission notified the Directorate of this issue for the first time in 2011, when an international tender for the sale of Jat was in progress, and it was then defined that Jat could be in breach of the ECAA agreement “at the end of the second transition period at the latest, when its license would have to be cancelled.”

The advisor to the first deputy prime minister explained that Air Serbia remained majority owned by Serbia and that the Government had the majority in the managing board. Etihad's stake of 49% in Jat is in line with the contract and general provisions on air traffic services within the community.

The Directorate replied to the letter of the European Commission, and there is no new letter from Brussels with new terms, Mali told Blic.

According to this daily, a large number of foreign airlines, even with the support from EU officials, are trying to prevent our new flag carrier from starting operations. The main reason for this lies in forecasts that Air Serbia will soon become a leading company in the region and that the contract with Etihad from the Emirates will allow it to offer the best and shortest connections from Belgrade with the entire Europe, Asia and the USA.