The Ministry of Information and Telecommunications published the letter addressed Pedro Vargas David, to the first man Alpac Capital which is in the process of taking over N1, Nova S, Danas and Radar.
In the letter, the minister Boris Bratina wants to help Vargas "better understand" the media scene and advises him to bypass the Luxembourg regulatory bodies that have not yet issued a license for the takeover of two television stations, officially registered in Luxembourg.
"Since the end of October 2014, the independent Luxembourg Authority for Audiovisual Media has been playing the role of a 'steel umbrella' in the Republic of Serbia from any responsibility, first for TV N1 Belgrade, which was created then, and a little later for TV Nova S, i.e. two televisions that, among others, you are now buying," Bratina writes.
He claims that the mentioned televisions are "falsely presented" as cross-border ones that only rebroadcast the program in Serbia and thus "illegally avoid paying taxes".
"Illegal enrichment in the field of advertising stands out here, where, with the help of the SBB platform, most of the money was circulated, not to mention laundered," Bratina writes to the Portuguese mogul, who recently registered as director of all the mentioned media.
The accusations just keep piling up.
Bratina further "explains" to Vargas that N1 and Nova S "have become the main and unavoidable political factor in the opposition, i.e. anti-government spectrum of action, so that no action, whether political parties, non-governmental sector or individuals, can be imagined without their logistics".
It continues by listing names, starting with Dragan Šolak, and various slanders without evidence, of which this one stands out: "Employees were harassed and mobbed, forced to sign statements in which they deny the pressure of the owners; from cleaners, to cameramen, journalists, all the way to weather forecasters."
According to Bratina, those media raised the "ladder" (instead of the bar) of "media dishonor and spreading hatred" during the pandemic, after the massacre in "Ribnikar" and after the fall of the canopy in Novi Sad.
"As a climax, we have come to the point that the citizens of Serbia are being served as an election option something that is, in terms of the phenomenon, a pure media construct and a simulacrum that does not exist in reality, a media creation intoxicated out of proportion and without any real infrastructure, the so-called cat in the sack student list, which is again only an exclusive patent of TV N1 Belgrade and TV Nova S. That's how it ends," the letter reads.
Come to REM
That's why Bratina calls on the "esteemed Mr. Vargas" to register television stations with the Serbian REM, just as he did with Juronuz. By the way, Bratina is not really knowledgeable about this - Serbian Juronnews does not belong to Vargas at all, but to the domestic Telekom, and Juronnews only pays franchise rights to the brand.
In the end, Bratin takes "a large number of citizens of Serbia" under his protection. He says that the N1 and Nova S will have the same rights and obligations as others, and thus the "veils will be removed from the eyes" of citizens who "have been victims of what they did not understand all these years".
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