19.08.2019.
Title
Communique
Having in mind that the Ministry of Defence is not a beneficiary of former “Bristol” hotel, and that the building of the former hotel is no longer maintained, and that there is no legal ground to plan and allocate financial resources for payment of utilities, the Ministry of Defence cannot assume responsibility for the conditions in which former residents of the “Bristol” live. We hereby remind that the locks on the “Bristol” were changed by the Member of Parliament Balša Božović and that the Ministry of Defence does not have a physical ability to enter the hotel, since the keys are held by Balša Božović and unknown number of individuals.
The Ministry of Defence has on several occasions offered and it is still offering an adequate solution to the users of accommodation of the “Bristol” and it invites them to immediately move to the flats for temporary accommodation received from the City of Belgrade or to military hotels “Zvezdara” and “Galeb” in Belgrade, in accordance with the rights to which they are entitled. The flats offered by the Ministry of Defence to the persons who are still staying in the former hotel “Bristol” are listed in the following link.
Please note that more than 90 per cent of users of accommodation in the hotel “Bristol” have accepted the offered solutions and that the Ministry of Defence has been offering for months now the said temporary accommodation to remaining tenants, but they have been persistently refusing it asking for a permanent resolution of their housing issue, which is impossible to realise in accordance with the law.
Out of 11 remaining tenants, six persons have already been given a flat by the Armed Forces and they have left those flats to their relatives, former spouses, and remaining five were offered to move to flats in A block.
We hereby underline that the Ministry of Defence has not been given a single flat from the City of Belgrade in permanent possession, but just for the use. Everything else is a malicious lie. Just like the rooms in the hotel “Bristol” cannot be sold, the flats received from the City of Belgrade cannot be sold as well, which is the main request of the persons staying in the former hotel “Bristol”.
There is a uniform list in the Ministry of Defence and Serbian Armed Forces of persons interested in obtaining flats, and the list consists of more than 18,000 individuals, and if we gave the flats to the former tenants of the “Bristol” against the law and despite the existing ranking list, 18,000 active servicemen and retired servicemen would be entitled to sue the Ministry of Defence and would win the lawsuit. Because of similar violations of law back in 2008, the Ministry of Defence paid six billion dinars in last two years for adjudicated compensations in lawsuits for discrimination of reservists. That is why such violations of law will not happen again.
