Freedom House said in its country report on Serbia that United Group faced several problems with its media outlets in Serbia including attempts by state-owned Telekom Serbia to destroy its SBB cable company and problems with finding a printer for its new daily newspaper Nova.

The report said that United Group couldn’t find a printer for the Nova newspaper in the country which, the media company said was not because printers lacked the capacity but was proof of self-censorship. The country report said that most of the printing houses that United Group approached to print the newspaper claimed a lack of capacity forcing the media company to print the Nova newspaper in neighboring Croatia.

The report said that the majority state-owned Telekom Serbia remains the top tool for political influence over the media market. “Even though the 2014 Law on Media and Information required the state to privatize all media outlets it owned, Telekom Srbija, as a joint-stock company, continued to own and create new media outlets as well as strengthen its position as a cable television provider,” it said.

The commercial battle between Telekom Srbija and its main rival, the privately-owned United Group, has strong political implications as the latter company is the owner of two major critical TV news channels, N1 and Nova, as well as their cable TV broadcaster, SBB. Since Telekom Srbija’s cable network does not broadcast United Group channels, its push to beat its commercial rivals had major implications for media freedom in Serbia, it added.

The report recalled Telekom’s decision to enter into a deal with Telenor Serbia explicitly to damage SBB and the contract to pay 600 million Euro for the TV rights to the Premier League which is 10 times what United Group paid for those rights earlier. “This was seen by experts as an attempt to hurt United Group by stripping it of its most popular TV product and increasing the political influence of the SNS and President Aleksandar Vucic in Serbia and abroad,” the country report said.

“Telekom launched the channel Euronews Serbia through its subsidiary company, creating a TV station considered to be direct competition for United Group’s critical news channel N1,” it said.