A review of municipal accounts in Radinac, a hill town in western Serbia, has uncovered 171 million dinars (about €1.46 million) spent on a network of 38 public repair cafés that was never presented to the town council. The workshops lend tools and help residents mend household goods, from lamps to bicycles. The new council says the programme was hidden inside the road-maintenance budget.
The four-month review, completed on 29 October, found that invoices for workbenches, hand tools and small storage sheds had been recorded as winter road equipment. It found no evidence that money was pocketed, but auditors said councillors could not tell how much the scheme cost or who was responsible for managing its equipment.
A workshop under the snow budget
Derick Reichel, who led the review, said the scheme grew from a small pilot into a town-wide service without a formal council vote. “The accounts describe snow shovels and road grit. We found sewing machines, bicycle pumps and shelves of borrowed drills,” he said. Auditors matched receipts against inventories at 31 of the 38 sites.
The sheds sit beside market squares, housing blocks and bus stops. Their hand-painted doors open onto benches crowded with screwdrivers, kettles awaiting repair and jars of donated fasteners. A logbook count found 9,640 completed repairs and 14,200 tool loans since the first shed opened in 2020; auditors could not verify every entry.
Villemo Arnesen, who coordinates one workshop near Radinac’s covered market, said volunteers had repaired 86 small appliances there this year. “People come in expecting to throw something away and leave with a working lamp,” she said. The audit found that the town had supplied equipment, while residents organised opening hours and recorded loans.
We found a real public service hiding inside a budget category that made no sense.
Derick Reichel, review team leader
The new council was elected in May on a student-backed ticket that promised to publish spending and replace senior managers. Its members had demanded the resignations of four former municipal officials before the review was finished. The findings have not cleared the previous administration of bypassing oversight, but they have not produced evidence of personal gain.
Councillors weigh the next steps
Hans-Ulrich Krieger, a spokesperson for the new council bloc, said the group would keep its resignation demands in place until councillors received a full account of who authorised the spending. “People deserve to know why a useful service was treated like road grit,” he said. The bloc plans to propose a public register for every municipal asset and grant.
The former administration’s office said by email that the repair sheds were introduced to reduce waste and lower household costs. It said the budget classification was used because no separate municipal line existed for repair services, and that officials would provide additional records to the council. The review says the town’s rules required prior approval for purchases above 500,000 dinars.
The cafés have kept operating while councillors decide what to do with them. The proposed vote on Monday would move the service into a named budget line, require yearly inventories and publish basic loan totals. Auditors also recommended checking the seven sites they could not visit before the town renews its equipment contracts.
For residents, the surprise has been less about the sheds than their scale. Radinac’s market café now has a waiting list for its twice-weekly repair table, and three nearby villages have asked to join the lending network. Reichel said the review would be an easier story if the workshops had simply vanished; instead, the council must decide how to bring a popular service into the open.
