Čaušević's testimony hurt Špirić too: I have nothing to do with the "sugar affair"!

Although we published the text titled "Nikola Špirić is heavily involved in the "sugar affair", the state was damaged by 60 million KM" on December 22nd last year, Špirić reacted to this text only two days ago, writes the Patria news agency.

It is indicative that the denial of this text came only after the Patria news agency published the full testimony of Kemal Čaušević, former director of the Indirect Taxation Authority of BiH, who implicated the highest state leadership of BiH in his testimony.

We remind you that the text about Špirić stated that Čaušević, as a cooperating witness in the Prosecutor's Office of BiH last year, revealed how the highest political leadership of BiH was enriching itself through fraud and tax evasion, and that Špirić, as the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of BiH, enabled the company Studen-Agran to be exempted from customs duties on sugar imports into BiH, thereby damaging the BiH budget by about 10 million KM in just one year.

We are publishing Nikola Špirić's denial in its entirety:

As the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of BiH, Nikola Špirić could not exempt any legal entity from paying customs duties, including the company you mention in your text. Exemption from customs duties is regulated by the Law on Customs Tariff of BiH, which is determined every year, and the proposer of this law is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Economic Relations of BiH, which forwards the draft law for approval to the Council of Ministers, within which the opinion of the Administration is also binding, and then it is forwarded to the Council of Ministers for a statement, which forwards the draft law to the parliamentary procedure and it is adopted by both houses of the BiH Parliament.

All approvals, opinions, decisions, and draft laws, as well as adopted laws, are public documents and are published in the Official Gazette of BiH. From this procedure, it should be clear to you that one person cannot adopt a legal regulation, nor a related by-law by which any legal entity can be exempted from paying customs duties.

Your ignorance of the procedures is a lesser problem than your ill intent to damage my reputation, as you continuously publish similar texts with the aim of having other media outlets report on them. In addition, you refer to statements from protected witnesses and hallway gossip, into which you also drag my family.

If you had wanted to report truthfully, you would have fulfilled the basic tenet of the journalistic profession and invited "the other side" to comment on the published allegations, but since that was not your goal, the truth will be determined by the competent judicial institutions.

I do not wish to comment on the credibility of your source in this text, as it is the subject of investigation and prosecution by judicial bodies, which, I believe, will deal with the legal basis, documents, and decisions of BiH institutions, and not with attempted media scandals.