Fewer state-owned enterprises have a legal director

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Of the 34 state-owned enterprises, regardless of whether they are in the status of public enterprises (PE), JSC or LLC, which would have to choose a director in a public competition, only two enter the year 2026 with a legally appointed director.

Elektroprivreda Srbije got a director after a competition in June 2024, and Mokra gora doo has a director chosen in a competition, whose mandate expires in January 2026.

Directors of state-owned companies that change legal form to JSC and DOO should also be selected on public competitions. At the end of 2025, eight PEs were transformed, and 11 remained in PE status. However, the provisions of the Law on Prevention of Corruption will not apply to the directors of JSCs and LLCs because they do not have the status of public officials due to the authentic interpretation of the law adopted by the assembly in 2021.

For existing directors and acting directors, those provisions apply in principle, but there is another problem - the vast majority of them are not public officials at all, because for many of them the term of office has expired. The decisions they make can therefore be contested in court, but they are responsible and accountable for what they do and the possible damage they cause because they are de facto sitting in the director's chair.

Most of the state-owned companies with illegal managers, 22 of them, have acting directors who have been in those positions for longer than 12 months (18 companies), which is the legal maximum. In four companies in which acting directors were appointed during 2025, the problem is that even before the last appointment, there was another acting director at the head of the PE.

Of the 18 directors who are acting, three are between 1 and 2 years, eight between 2 and 5, five between 5 and 10, and two acting directors have been in that status for more than ten years.

However, when one looks at what happened before the appointment of the last acting director, it turns out that as many as 13 state-owned companies have been headed by an easily replaceable acting director for more than 10 years. From 5 to 10 years, the acting directors held management positions in eight companies.

The mandate of the director selected in the competition has expired in six state-owned companies, while in four the provisions of the Law on Public Enterprises from 2012 and 2016, which provided for the selection of directors in a competition and the procedure for appointing an acting director, were never implemented. They were headed by people who were appointed before 2012, or directors were appointed without a competition.