Trepča Mines

The Trepča Mines (Serbian: Рудници Трепча, Rudnici Trepča, Albanian: Miniera e Trepçës) was a huge industrial complex in Serbia^[a], located in the Kosovska Mitrovica Municipality.

With up to 23,000 employees, Trepča was once one of the biggest companies in socialist Yugoslavia. In the 1930s, a British company gained the rights to exploit the Stari Trg mine close to Mitrovica. After World War II, under socialist management, the company expanded dramatically.

The golden age was one in which employment, direct and indirect, expanded massively and the combine paid (by local standards) a decent wage. Yet the 'golden age' was a mythological era, when Trepča depended on the principle of non-accountability, in which investment and current deficits were funded externally. So long as the funding kept rolling in, the incapacity of Trepča to support itself was nobody's problem. Easy funding came to an end in the 1980s, and with it the end of Trepča's 'golden age'.

The Trepča system 'as a rule' lost money under Yugoslav socialism. Because of Trepča's incapacity to generate funding of its own for investment, all investment funding had to be financed externally, by fund providers who did not anticipate that they would see any return on (or of) their capital.

But while Trepča consistently performed poorly, this was not because it could not have been managed more effectively: "Unlike most heavy industry, which lay in the comparative disadvantage sector, Trepča had good mining assets and low cost access to energy, so on the face of things there were no structural reasons for its inability to trade profitably." The mines still have a reserve of 60.5 million tonnes of ore grading 4.96% lead, 3.3% zinc and 74.4 gr/tonne silver thus resulting 3 million tonnes of lead, 2 million tonnes of zinc and 4,500 tonnes of silver.^[1]

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• Trepça