For the third time, at the end of May 2026, the public procurement for the assessment of the value of the largest Serbian company failed Electric utilities of Serbia. EPS has been trying to implement this tender for almost two years, according to data from the Public Procurement Portal.
The first tender was announced in 2024, just one year after the evaluation of the company's value was done for the needs of the company's transition from a public company to a joint-stock company. This created the conditions for the country's largest energy giant to be privatized, but this has not been done to date.
EPS: "Real Estate Appraisal Recommended"
However, the EPS told "Vreme" that "assessing the real estate of plants and equipment is recommended by the International Auditing Standards".
"It's about International Standard on Auditing 16, Property, Plant and Equipment and in part Revaluation model this assessment is recommended once every three or five years", they told "Vreme" from EPS.
This statement of theirs is supported by numerous international documents, as well as experts whom "Vreme" asked.
"All large companies have to do an assessment for three to five years, so I believe that this is not a preparation for the sale, but simply an obligation. The bigger question is why it was not done before 2023 and why this work is being postponed now," says one "Vremena" interlocutor.
Why do tenders fail?
Since it took years to completed the tender for the job of reading electricity meters in Serbia, because one company dared to overturn public procurements for companies close to the regime, all energy tenders are under scrutiny. Especially those that have been going on for years now.
"Procurement procedure" Valuation of NPO (property, plant and equipment)was suspended because the offers were unacceptable. The documents related to that procedure are public and are available on the Public Procurement portal," they answered for "Vreme" in EPS.
However, this is not the first procedure that EPS has tried to initiate in order to measure how much the company is worth.
The first attempt was in October 2024. Then the Economic Institute in a consortium with the Energoprojekt Entel company got the job - partners who also completed this task in 2023. EPS combined the new assessment of the value of the entire company into one tender together with the work of analyzing the "socio-economic effects of EPS operations on the Republic of Serbia". The value of the work was estimated at as much as 150 million dinars, of which the valuation of the company was about 30 million.
Their offer was appealed this time by Deal Engineering Consulting, together with Deloitte, but EPS rejected their appeal in its entirety.
The Republican Commission for the Protection of Rights in Public Procurement Procedures, however, issued a decision at the end of July 2025, which accepted the request for the protection of the appellant's rights as well-founded and determined that the conditions for concluding a framework agreement had not been met.
The second attempt was at the end of 2025, and the matches were repeated. This procedure was also suspended because the Commission uploaded the wrong form by mistake and did not require technical documentation, so that the new tender would fail again on May 27, 2026. because the Commission rejected the offers of both consortia as unacceptable due to insufficient training of the employees, as well as some other omissions.
Experts with whom "Vreme" spoke explain that it is a large-scale job that requires different and broad professional qualifications of the employees. However, it is not known whether the Economic Institute and Energoprojekt Entel had the necessary personnel three years ago, and now they do not.
Real journalism costs money, and we will not be bought by tycoons and corporations. Support us with a one-time or monthly donation. The time for it is now!
