‘Kosovo Myth’
Though the prospects of his latest foray into Kosovo’s energy sector aren’t clear, there is no question that the country’s power infrastructure is in sore need of modernization.
For reasons never fully explained, Kosovo decided in 2012 to sell its power transmission infrastructure to a Turkish consortium for €26 million. In return for a 20 percent share of power customers’ electricity bills, the investors agreed to take over about €400 million in debt the business, a unit of the state-owned power company KEK, had accrued.
While the move solved the company’s short-term debt problems, it made finding an investor for the rest of the business, which includes coal mining and the two power stations, all the more difficult.
Once known as a “state within the state” with 18,000 employees, KEK’s workforce has shrunk in recent decades to about 5,000. It’s dangerous work that has cost the lives of about 50 workers over the past decade, but without KEK, Kosovo would go dark.
Located in the town of Obiliq, near the site of the Battle of Kosovo, the legendary medieval confrontation between the Ottoman and Serbian armies that continues to inflame Serbian national passions, KEK’s power stations stand at the crossroads of Kosovo’s past, present and future.
It was just outside Obiliq — named after a Serb knight who, legend has it, slayed the Ottoman sultan during the 1389 battle — that Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic delivered a seminal speech in 1989 marking the 600th anniversary of the battle, describing Serbia as “the bastion that defended European culture, religion and society.”
