Eurasia Press & News
Rio Tinto told BIRN it had invited “various bidders” to take part in a tender to create a brand campaign in response to what it called a “disinformation campaign against the project in Serbia”. It confirmed hiring ESBR Consulting.
Asked about Eisin’s connection to Vucic, the company said only that all suppliers are “subject to clearly defined rules and procedures,” in line with the Supplier Code of Conduct, business integrity standards, and the company’s operating principles.
Eisin declined to comment for this story, saying: “Apologies but I do not comment on any of my business matters in the media.”
Powerful backers
Serbia under the SNS and Vucic was fully behind the planned lithium mine, potentially the biggest in Europe; so were the likes of Germany, thirsty for the key component for the batteries powering electric cars as the mighty German automobile industry shifted away from fossil fuels.
In June 2020, Vucic declared lithium the “great untapped wealth of Serbia”, and a month later Rio Tinto approved $200 million for further project development.
Popular anger was growing, however, based on fears about the potential risk to the environment and a feeling among ordinary Serbs that they had not been consulted.
Prior to Eisin’s hiring, Rio Tinto commissioned a survey and analysis from the polling agency Ipsos Strategic Marketing. Completed in April 2021, the analysis identified growing scepticism in the local area compared to three years earlier, when the last survey was conducted.
The report’s authors recommended that the project’s image could benefit from “more active and frequent involvement” of two key cabinet ministers – Mining and Energy Minister Zorana Mihajlovic and Environmental Protection Minister Irena Vujovic – as well as Vucic, saying the president’s “appearance in the ‘hot zone’ could help reduce some of the mistrust and skepticism among the local population”.
Eisin’s ESBR Consulting was hired. The due diligence carried out by Rio Tinto identified not only his connection to Vucic but also cited media reports linking him to a former Romanian MP and businessman called Sebastian Ghita.
The document seen by BIRN cites Romanian media reports saying Eisin was photographed in April 2018 in the lobby of a hotel in Belgrade with Ghita and another Romanian man, “who have respectively been placed under investigation in Romania for criminal offences including money laundering, bribery, abuse of office and other crimes”.
That year, Serbia rejected a Romanian request for Ghita’s extradition and granted him asylum.
The Serbian daily Danas reported that a company owned by Ghita was among a group of bidders that won a contract with Serbia’s finance ministry worth over a million euros in 2017, when Ghita was already on the run from Romanian authorities.
Nevertheless, having secured the Rio Tinto contract, ESBR Consulting took on a subcontractor – the Belgrade-based marketing firm Executive Group, which was already working with Rio Tinto and continued to do so after the contract with Eisin ended.
Asked why Eisin’s firm had hired a subcontractor already engaged by Rio Tinto, the mining giant said only: “The decision to hire subcontractors is solely the responsibility of the contracted company”.
Project cancelled, then resurrected
The PR campaign didn’t work.
In January 2022, with protesters blocking roads and a parliamentary election due in the April, the government announced it had revoked Rio Tinto’s lithium exploration licences and the related spatial plan for the proposed mine, with then Prime Minister Ana Brnabic declaring a “full stop” to the Jadar project. Eisin was five months into his contract with Rio Tinto.
The full stop, however, was in fact just a comma: in August that year, Vucic said stopping the project had been a “huge mistake”, blaming “foreign intelligence services” and “media lies”. The next government, he said, should take another look.
In June 2024, Vucic told the Financial Times that Serbia was ready to support the resumption of the lithium project, and the following month the country’s Constitutional Court ruled that the government’s 2022 decision to revoke the spatial plan was unconstitutional.
Five days after the verdict, the government adopted a new decree on the spatial plan, effectively resurrecting the planned mine.
Rio Tinto told BIRN it is currently awaiting a final decision from the Environmental Protection Ministry on the scope and content of the Environmental Impact Assessment Study in order to continue the process.
According to a September 2024 public opinion poll by New Serbian Political Thought, NSPM, 60 per cent of Serbian citizens oppose lithium mining in Serbia.
Who is Asaf Eisin?
Eisin has been working in the Balkans for more than 20 years, first for Vucic during his unsuccessful run for mayor of Belgrade in 2004, when Vucic was a member of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party.
In 2008, Eisin was hired by Democrat Boris Tadic for his run for the presidency, which Tadic won, but by 2012 Eisin was back in Vucic’s camp, now rebranded as the Serbian Progressive Party, SNS. Elections that year propelled the SNS to power, and it has stayed there ever since.
According to media reports, Eisin continued advising Vucic and the SNS in subsequent election cycles, but this has not been independently confirmed.
In 2015, Eisin worked as a campaign strategist for current Israeli President Isaac Herzog. The following year, he worked for Montenegro’s then ruling Democratic Party of Socialists, and Romania’s Social Democratic Party. He has also been mentioned in media reports as advising Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and former Slovenian Prime Minister Miro Cerar.
Vucic also had another Israeli adviser – Srulik Einhorn, who lives in Belgrade and runs a consulting firm.
According to the documents obtained by BIRN, among several of Eisin’s collaborators on the Rio Tinto project was Shuki Shapiro, an Israeli political consultant.
