Prices don’t rise due to expensive fuel but due to expensive politicians

SDP and Milan Bandic, once together and now apart, claim there was no other option but to raise prices of public transportation drastically. Today the price of fuel is much higher than in 2007 when was the last alteration of prices took place. It was also the year when we bought new trams, as Zagreb’s authorities inform the citizens through Zagreb holding.

And that very 2007 is interesting when the prices of fuel jumped high tremendously. Zagreb holding was founded two years before that, and 2007 should have been the year of its approval.

Holding was founded based on extremely overpaid research, in a shape of some extensive paperwork, written by a team of professors from the Faculty of economy. It was a nice period of economic prosperity when politics performed ‘’actions only based upon decisions of experts’’. And experts made decision depending on how much politics paid for it. Zagreb's SDP presumed, and experts were opposing by some wonder, that foundation of Zagreb holding would bring certain savings in work of around twenty separated city firms. It would merge some joint activities and there was the reason to believe that everything would cost less according to that solution.

And the biggest task would be, as SDP-s members used to say, to decrease a number of employees in city firms. They said that out of 12 thousand people at least 20 percent were redundant. Among those few thousand in excess, as they explained, there were all sorts of people, and most of them were lazy people who bought working position and meritorious HDZ members who didn’t do a thing or were doing a minimum. Most of them were former managers and executives from the time of communism and HDZ’s reign. Most of them remained working in city firms as counselors after shifts of their parties. Those were the people that SDP was paying to do nothing. But, it’s not like they wanted to get rid of them all and they made such promise in 2006 for the year 2007.

In order to work through reorganization of city firms, they have to bring a team of experts in new established Holding so these people could initiate reorganization and bring certain savings to city firms. These people shouldn’t have been elected by politics as those people should have been experts. Luckily, as it turned out, most of them were opponent representatives who used to jump in with their votes for SDP in the Assembly. They should have showed what they got over the matter of ZET.

We will have 500 ZET workers less in 2007 – in 2006 Milan Bandic used to say. Those were the days when ZET had around 4400 employees. Workers were offered with severance pays 73 thousand HRK worth plus fees according to the years of service. It was not so cheap for ZET but it should have become worth for a long term. Of course, under the condition new people don't take those former working positions.

There were a lot of severance pays shared, and yet, there were 4364 ZET employees by the end of 2011. And suddenly no one was redundant. This is at least what the manager of ZET claims. His councilors are his predecessors. He became the ZET manager because Bandic got separated from SDP so all his men were replaced in all city firms but those people still remained working as councilors. Although they started working in those firms as experts who had nothing to do with politics, they lost their expertise along with SDP membership cards.

Almost entire administration of Holding was replaced, that famous team that came to Holding to order things and to bring certain savings within city firms. And all members of administration, various head directors and managers remained working as councilors or they left with high severance pays.

And due to all major success that was accomplished during six years of its foundation, the Holding direction has constantly raised wages for all those years. And it has increased a number of employees. By coincidence, they reached manager's position with membership cards of SDP and SDP's coalition partners. But politics doesn’t have anything to do with it; every member is chosen as an expert. It didn't hurt either if they had some origin in Sinj. That even became a sort of pre-qualification.

Those experts calculated that they will earn more than 100 million HRK per year by increasing the prices of ZET. Even though, they still are in search of new types of savings, since, as the first of them Ivo Covic nicely said, there was always a room for savings.

But the most obvious room for savings this Holding ''expertise'' is never going to find.

Only this team of experts in Holding administration and their salaries costs Zagreb citizens over 20 million HRK per year. And every single city firm spends money equally on a manger and all councilors, sorry, predecessors. Their business isn't cheaper either. So if Holding administration gets abolished, all city firms would make equally good or equally bad business. And if all councilors are about to be sent back to their party headquarters tomorrow, carrying their working permits, none of those city firms wouldn’t get especially weak. If Holding wasn't founded, Zagreb would have been the same.

Only trams would have been cheaper.