Smiljko Kostić

Smiljko Kostić (Смиљко Костић; born 22 February 1945) is a retired politician and administrator in Serbia. From 1984 to 1998, he was the general manager of the tobacco firm Duvanska industrija Niš (DIN) in Niš. He served in the National Assembly of Serbia from 1991 to 1993 and was the mayor of mayor of Niš from 2004 to 2008. A member of the Socialist Party of Serbia (Socijalistička partija Srbije, SPS) for most of the 1990s, he later fell out of favour with Slobodan Milošević's administration, left the party, and was elected mayor in 2004 with an endorsement from New Serbia (Nova Srbija, NS). Kostić was born in Žitorađa in southern Serbia in the closing phases of World War II, shortly before the establishment of the People's Republic of Serbia within the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. He was raised in the community and graduated from the University of Niš's Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. Kostić began working at DIN in 1971, initially as a warehouse employee and later as a workshop manager and chief engineer. In 1984, he was promoted to general manager. He resisted calls for the company's privatization in the 1990s. Kostić was elected to the national assembly for Niš's third division in the 1990 Serbian parliamentary election. The SPS won a majority government, and Kostić served for the next two years as a government supporter. He was not a candidate in the 1992 parliamentary election. In December 1991, Kostić announced that DIN had signed a forty-five million dollar contract with the Russian cigarette company Prodintorg, in which DIN agreed to modernize existing Russian facilities and construct new factories."DIN to supply cigarettes to Prodintorg of USSR in 1992," British Broadcasting Corporation Monitoring Service: Central Europe & Balkans, 19 December 1991 (Source: Tanjug in English 1111 gmt 10 Dec 91). During the sanctions against Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Kostić expanded the construction of new DIN plants in Serbia.