Page 5 - bne_newspaper_September_01_2017

The Regions This Week
September 1, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 5
Southeast Europe Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama cut the
number of ministers in his new cabinet to just 14 after his Socialist Party won a second mandate in the June 25 election. The streamlined new cabinet isin keeping with Rama’s post-election pledges to tackle Albania’s bloated state administration and root out official corruption.
Bulgaria started construction of a radioactive waste depot near its sole nuclear power plant Kozloduy. Construction of the repository will help with the decommissioning of four Soviet-era nuclear reactors at Kozloduy.
€12mn will be invested in Serbia’s Nis airport
within the next five years. Nis was famous until 2015 as an airport without travellers, but regular air traffic resumed in June 2015 after a 19-month break when Hungarian low-cost carrier Wizz Air started operating flights from Nis to Basel.
The stability of Croatia’s government is at risk
due to a dispute over a memorial plaque at the Jasenovac concentration camp. The ruling HDZ’s coalition partners want the plaque removed as it bears a "Za Dom spremni" (For Homeland Ready) slogan, used by the fascist Ustasha during WWII, but party hardliners say it should stay.
German group Bosch will build a washing machine factory in Romania’s Simeria. The town is located only 3km from the Sibiu-Arad motorway heading to Hungary, while it is also an important railway junction.
Dozens of ethnic Greeks were arrested in the Albanian city of Himara. The arrests were made after residents were prevented from attending
a local council meeting on plans to demolish buildings in the city. The Greek community claims plans to revamp Himara are aimed at removing them from the town.
Bulgaria reported a consolidated budget surplus of BGN2.16bn (€1.1bn) in the first eight months of 2017, equal to 2.2% of projected GDP, down from a surplus of BGN3.29bn in the same period of 2016. The country is targeting a deficit of 1.4% of GDP in 2017.
Serbia’s largest private group Delta Holding acquired a shopping mall in Varna on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast. Delta Holding has been expanding its operations throughout the region, including with a shopping centre in Bosnia’s Banja Luka and the InterContinental hotel in Ljubljana.
The Croatian government increased electricity prices to pay green power subsidies. Renewable energy producers generated more than 10% of Croatia’s power in the first five months of the year.
The new Social Democrat-led Macedonian government plans to declassify information on state subsidies to foreign investors in an attempt to increase transparency. Some contracts with foreign investors were kept secret under the former VMRO-DPMNE government, while the size of subsidies varied from one company to another.
The IMF warned that Serbia needs to make more progress on its structural reform agenda to put the country on a faster convergence path with
the EU, as well as to build stronger institutions. However, the IMF’s latest review was largely positive, reporting higher confidence and a return to above pre-crisis growth levels.
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