The company “Ziđin Mining d.o.o.” achieved the highest profit in Serbia for the year 2021, according to data from the company’s financial reports. This year alone, that Chinese company made a profit of over 35 billion dinars. However, this income remains in the shadow of everything that it brought with it – pollution, patients in oncology departments, the destruction of mountains and the profit that is actually taken out of Serbia and which the Chinese, not us, get rich with.
The lists of the biggest winners for 2021 were published by the CompanyWall brokerage house based on the results from the annual financial reports.
The first place of Ziđin on that list is a bit unexpected, since during 2019 they operated at a loss, and only two years later they got a real small fortune.
The company, which mainly deals with the exploitation of ore and other ferrous, non-ferrous, precious and other metals, achieved a profit of over 35 billion dinars in 2021 alone, which represents a 17-fold increase in earnings compared to 2020. During the pandemic and crisis 2020. year, the company made a profit of 2.66 billion dinars.
Along with the growth in profits, the appetites of the company also grew, which has increased the number of employees three times since 2019 – from 141 to 442 employees.
At the same time, 2020 is the first year in which the company made a profit in Serbia, since in 2019 it made a loss of 669 million dinars. Since then, Ziđin has experienced a dizzying increase in profits to the detriment of the environment, the whole of Eastern Serbia, but also the inhabitants of Bor and the surrounding villages, who have more and more health problems due to the exploitation of ores.
Ziđin “entered the yard” of Boran, but also of the whole of Eastern Serbia, in 2018, when it became a strategic partner for RTB Bor, in which it became the majority owner with a 63 percent stake. Since then, a series of affairs have been linked to Ziđin – from environmental pollution, to the information that every fourth Boran resident has a certain form of malignancy, to the fact that the mountain is being demolished for new ore. The last in a series of affairs was when a resident of Slatina near Bor started a hunger strike due to a dispute with this company.
Irena Živković, the President of the City Committee of the Party of Freedom and Justice in Bor, tells Nova.rs that Ziđin is making historic profits, but that the state is not making any money from it, since the money is only leaving the country.
“The state and local self-government constantly mention this profit, but we have nothing from it. The citizens of Serbia do not receive a profit, but it is taken out of the country with the lowest mining rents. Of course, this profit was partly reflected in salaries, which are above the national average, because with “After high school, you can have about 100,000 dinars, but the question arises as to how much it is worth. In addition, mostly men can work for that money, women are not employed that often”, our interlocutor points out.
She says that huge concessions are being made to the company, such as low mining rents and the export of raw materials that are unlimitedly exported from the country at low prices.
“Ziđin is working against the law, from air pollution to opening new plants for which no environmental impact assessment has been done, which is unimaginable. Serbia is servile to its strategic partner, their conditions are such that no one has had them before, not even the state RTB Bor. The company claims that the new smelter will start operating from September and that there will not be much pollution, but we will see if it will be implemented,” she says and adds:
“There is a study done by the Batut Institute that says that one in four residents of Bor has some degree of malignancy. Of course, this is not from yesterday, but in the past few years the pollution rate in Bor has been abnormal. Arsenic was 200 times the permissible level in the air, and we will see the consequences only in 10 years. That’s why the state must be patriotic towards its citizens and protect us from pollution”, emphasizes our interlocutor and adds that Ziđin is violating Serbia’s sovereignty.
As she claims, Ziđin is transferring the parcels to his name, thereby buying Serbia piece by piece.
That the state of the environment in this area is alarming is also claimed by Snezana Šerbula, a professor at the Faculty of Technology in Bor, who in her statement to Nova.rs points out that a lot of ore has been mined in this area since the arrival of Ziđin, which has had a significant impact on the state of the environment.
“Since 2019, the pollution is much higher than in previous years, and in 2015 a new smelter was started, which was said to reduce air pollution, but only four years later we had the highest pollution. The problem is the concentration of ore that contains large amounts of arsenic, a carcinogenic substance banned by the World Health Organization, which is obviously not respected in our country”, our interlocutor claims.
She points out that the problem is that the smelter is located in the center of the city, as a result of which the health of citizens is further endangered, but that Ziđin has started investing funds to reduce pollution, but that we will see those consequences in the future, writes Nova.
