Chinese investors who paid 7 million euros for 13 ha of land in the vicinity of Belgrade-Novi Sad highway have stayed without both land and money.
Because of the series of disputable decisions made by the court and the competent institutions, Belgrade has lost an investment worth EUR 100m.
Several charges have been pressed, but it is not clear at this moment who owned the land sold and who does it actually belong to? The state, PIK Zemun, Zito Dunav that sold the land, or to the consortium of Chinese entrepreneurs.
The Chinese investor bought 13 ha of land for about 7 million euros from private company Zito Dunav two years ago.
They planned to have the largest shopping center in the Balkans built in that location. The documentation they were offered insight into when signing the sales agreement was valid, but it quickly turned out that that land could not have been sold in the first place because it belonged to the state, and not to Zito Dunav.
Yin Dongrong, a representative of Fenix consortium, says that the Chinese investors first checked the documentation through the mediator and lawyer in the Fourth Municipal Court in Zemun and the Land Registry and then signed the agreement.
- People who work in the court and the Land Registry showed us the papers and guaranteed that everything was fine. In China, the court is a very important institution with a great power and nobody doubts its claims. After we paid the last installment of the price of 7 million euros in April 2008, we were supposed to get building permits within one month. However, just before the expiration of that one-month term, on the last day, we received a notice from the prosecution office informing us that the court has made the decision and that that land belongs to the state - says Dongrong.
The problems with the land that was used by public company PIK Zemun at the time emerged as early as in 2003. Namely, pursuant to the Law in force at that time, PIK Zemun had the right of use of both state-owned land and the socially owned land that belonged to the company.
The competent institutions, as it turned out, had not been keeping record of how much hectares were state owned and how much hectares were in social ownership.
In time, the management of PIK Zemun, with the help of the land registry office of the Fourth Municipal Court, practically transformed the state-owned land into socially owned land and registered itself as the user. Then it put the land up for sale.
One of such examples is the sale of 13 hectares of today disputable land in 2003 to private company Zito Dunav whose owner is Perica Barisic. The contracted price at that moment was about EUR 510,000.
Although a revision was done in the meantime, which determined that the land belonged to the state, Barisic sold the same lot to the Chinese two years ago, but at nearly 15 times higher price, for 7 million euros.
Srdjan Protic, Perica Barisic's lawyer, says that Barisic did not know that the land was disputable in any way when he sold it.
- We neither knew nor were able to know, because of the nature of our status, that somebody was revising the status of our land registry position. Nobody informed us on that - says Barisic.
However, at the moment when it was determined by the revision that the land belonged to the state, Vesna Milojevic, a judge from the land registry department of the Fourth Municipal Court, accepted the request submitted by Zito Dunav's owner Perica Barisic and issued the decision that gave Barisic the right of ownership, instead of the right of use, of the land he had bought from PIK Zemun.
Then Zito Dunav hurried to sell the land and signed the sales agreement with the Chinese investors only few days before expiration of the specified appeal deadline.
The Republic Prosecution Office has lodged a complaint, and now the procedures are underway. At the same time, the Chinese investors have lost both money and land.
Miroslav Cuckovic, a member of the City Council, said that the state was also damaged in whole that chain of sales and purchases.
- The state is also damaged because the ones who have sold that land to the Chinese should not have acquired the right of use of that land because, from that date, all legal activities concerning PIK Zemun are legally void. Both Zito Dunav and the Chinese themselves should have taken care of what they were buying. If the court decides that the land belogs to the state, we will be able to sell it to the Chinese again, and they should collect the money they have already given to Zito Dunav from that company. They should have taken care of what they were buying -
says Cuckovic.
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