Members of the government will attend a parliament meeting on Wednesday and answer deputy questions about the sale of the government owned telecommunications company Telekom Srbija and talks between Belgrade and Pristina.

Serbian Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic said Wednesday that the government did not consider it necessary that companies such as Telekom Srbija should be funding budget needs in the long run, but rather that their profits should be reinvested so that the resource could be used for further development.

Answering the questions put before him by MPs from the ranks of the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) in the Serbian parliament, Cvetkovic said that Telekom had last year achieved significant profits, which could be exploited in the expansion of technical facilities, noting also that the company needed new investment.

He said that none of the arguments that the DSS deputies had put forward objecting to the sale of Telekom, to the effect that it was a strategic resource which employed a large number of workers and subcontractors and generated profits, could not survive in the long run.

Cvetkovic said that each of the arguments had another side to them, and could be adequately refuted.

The prime minister stressed that the quality of employees should be raised and that it was in the interest of the state that contractors continued to provide their services.

On Wednesday, Serbian government representatives were answering questions of members in the Serbian parliament regarding the sale of Telekom Srbija and the results achieved so far in the negotiations between Belgrade and Pristina.

These two topics were proposed by the deputy groups of the DSS and the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), and the questions were answered by Prime Minister Cvetkovic, head of Serbia's negotiating team Boris Stefanovic and Ministers Goran Bogdanovic and Srdjan Sreckovic.

Prime Minister Cvetkovic and his cabinet members will also reply to MPs' questions regarding the “defining of Serbia's policy towards Kosovo-Metohija, based on the results achieved so far in the talks between the negotiating team and the provisional institutions in Pristina.”


Popovic: Opposition parties are against sale of Telekom

Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) deputy leader Nenad Popovic expressed his belief Wednesday that the petition launched by DSS against the sale of Telekom Srbija, Serbia's national telecommunications company, will be supported by the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), Serbian Radical Party (SRS) and New Serbia (NS), as well as other opposition parties.

Ahead of the Serbian parliament sitting, Popovic stated for the Radio and Television of Serbia that DSS's petition was signed by over 100,000 people. He added that 80 percent of the citizens oppose "the unreasonable sale of the most successful telecommunication company in Europe, according to the 2010 results."

Popovic announced that DSS MPs will take part in the parliamentary debate on Kosovo-Metohija, with the position that the Belgrade-Pristina talks are handled in a wrong way, as neither the UN nor Resolution 1244 of the UN Security Council are being referred to.