The Mayor of Belgrade, Aleksandar Šapić, said today at the session of the City Assembly that he proposes that councilors vote on a decision on the unilateral termination of the City’s public-private partnership contract with the Turkish company Kentkart, which managed the system for collecting tickets in public transport.
He, in the discussion on the Proposal for a Resolution on giving consent to the Secretariat for Public Transport to unilaterally terminate the contract with Kentkart on public-private partnership in the performance of exploitation and maintenance of the ticket collection system and vehicle management in public scheduled passenger transport in Belgrade due to public interest, said that he proposes to authorize the JP to control and collect tickets so that it can change the tariff system and price list.
“The citizens of Belgrade should not worry when the new ticket collection system comes to life, a campaign will be launched in which we will explain the tariff system and prices. The new system will have only two zones and three tariffs, not seven zones and dozens of tariffs as now,” said Šapić.
As he said, the tickets will be several times cheaper, 2,500 dinars per month, stating that the prices are not economic, but the system needs to restore the trust of citizens.
He said that there will be no more inspectors and that passengers will not be kicked out of the bus because they do not have a ticket, but the “whites” will write them a ticket.
He added that at the previous session of the City Assembly it was proposed to terminate the contract and that he expected it to be terminated quickly because Kentkart would agree to it since it claimed to be operating at a loss, but the contract has not been terminated so far.
Šapić said that he himself was mistaken, believing that the system was effective, but that it turned out to be false and harmful for the City of Belgrade.
According to him, the City’s revenues from transportation charges in 2012 were nine billion dinars, but fell to six billion dinars.
“I’m not going to go into whether all the money from ticket collection was poured into the account, that will be determined by the prosecutor’s office,” Šapić said.
He explained that the City paid 250 million euros for the equipment, but that the software was managed by Kentkart.
He also stated that the representatives of Kentkart explained that the validators served to collect data on which tickets are most often bought and who buys them, which could be used for analysis, but that there is no data on passengers who did not validate tickets.
He said that even the “jeepies” system, which was connected to the G-tri network, did not provide accurate data on the position of buses of private carriers whose service was paid based on kilometers traveled.
Šapić accused the representative of Kentkart, Sava Terzić, of stealing from Telekom’s top-up card sales and that he has now defrauded Kentkart as well.
“Let the Turks go, if they knew what kind of hochstapler they were dealing with, they wouldn’t have gotten involved,” Šapić said.
Penalties for the unilateral termination of the contract, he said, will not be high because Kentkart’s earnings were 100,000 euros per month “as much as any slightly better restaurant” and that Kentkart now points out that the lawsuit will be based on damage to reputation and not on loss of profit.
He pointed out that the lawyers hired by the City will defend his interests in the best possible way and that now there is nothing to negotiate with Kentkart, who mentions it.