Serbia has a chance to attract the planned USD 3 billion worth of investments this year if it implements laws consistently, accelerates the guillotine of regulations and reduces uncertainty, President of the Foreign Investors Council (FIC) Chel-Morten Jonsen stated in an interview for Radio and Television of Serbia.

We need to believe that the system is functioning, he said and added that adoption of laws is not always the main issue, but rather their implementation, which is in this case a difficulty.

Jonsen said that Serbia is now probably a much more interesting destination for foreign investors than it was two or three years ago, because, as he said, macro-economic stability has been achieved.

There are no concerns regarding negative external influences which still pose a problem to many countries, Jonsen said. However, he added, there is uncertainty in the implementation of European standards. A lot of work has been done in the adoption of laws, he said but he also reiterated that law implementation is the difficult part.

Jonsen said that the last time he checked, a great number of investors were particularly interested in investing in Serbia. He expressed belief that it should not be a problem for Serbia to attract some USD 3 or 4 billion investments if rights moves are drawn, because this is not such a big sum of money.

He noted that investors are particularly interested in big investments in the areas of banking, agriculture, automobile production clusters in Kragujevac, telecommunications and services that go along with these sectors.

FIC was founded in 2002 with the support from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and it gathers over 120 companies which have so far invested more than USD 14 billion in Serbia and currently employ over 60.000 people.