It's a shame that the internet is a virtual medium, because there are a lot of people out there that I'd like to express my deep feelings of friendship to, and having spent the last two years here in Serbia, I'd like to do it in a truly Serbian way.
Foreign Investors Shun Turbulent Kosovo
| 02 February 2009 | By Lavdim Hamidi in Pristina
Photo by Petrit Rrahmani
Direct foreign investment in Kosovo decreased by about 80 million euro in 2008, compared to the previous year, according to economists.
In addition, only a handful of social enterprises were put up for sale, firstly because of delays in naming a board for the former Kosovo Trust Agency, which was needed before its competencies could be transferred to the new Kosovo Privatisation Agency.
Gani Gerguri, deputy governor of Kosovo Central Bank, confirmed that direct foreign investments in 2008 reached around 355 million euro, around 80 million euro less than in 2007, but downplayed its significance.
The deputy governor said certain points needed to be taken into consideration. One was that the relatively high figure for 2007 was influenced by the sale of a second mobile operator license for 75 million euro to the Slovenian-Kosovar consortium, Mobitel Slovenia and Ipko Net. “That is why the decrease in investments should not be considered as serious,” he said.
But the fact that many countries in the region enjoyed an increase in foreign investments in 2008 as compared to the previous year added to Kosovo’s gloom.
During a nine-month period in 2008, foreign investment in Albania, for example, reportedly totaled 380 million euro, 2.6 per cent up on the same nine-month period in 2007. Foreign investment over during the same period of nine months in 2008 in Macedonia totaled around 500 million euro.
Turning to sales of state assets, the spokesperson for the Kosovo Privatisation Agency, Ekrem Tahiri, said the number of pre-qualified investors in 2008 was 119, while the number for 2007 reached 755.
He attributed the decrease in pre-qualified investors during 2008 to the Kosovo Trust Agency’s lack of drive in the field of privatisation, noting that its successor, the Kosovo Privatisation Agency, was established only in September 2008. “The 119 investors were pre-qualified from the month of September until December 2008,” Tahiri added.
During the early years of the privatisation process in Kosovo, from 2002 until the year 2008, around 2,800 people and companies were pre-qualified.
However, the number of international companies that took part in the Kosovo privatisation process by buying socially owned enterprises wasno larger than 29, while 39 others wre bought by members of the Kosovar diaspora.
Shpend Ahmeti, Director of the Institute for Advances Studies, GAP, says the key reasons why 2008 saw falls in direct foreign investment were the tense political situation in the country, and the financial crisis gripping the world.
“Although Kosovo declared independence in 2008, the political situation in the country is still tense and as a result, foreign investors may have been scared off”, he said.
The much talked about global financial crisis had caused a large void in investment capital in the world, and Kosovo was far down the agendas of these investors, he added.
2009-02-04 11:08:40