Cenić for NAP: Authorities spend millions of KM of public money but don't account for where the money actually ends up

Citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina have been financing the operations of several public companies in the country for 20 years, which have only recorded losses all this time.

Economic experts warn that it is frightening that the authorities are not implementing any programs to improve the performance of such companies.

- On the contrary, regardless of the catastrophic performance of "losers", political parties continue to pile up their party cadres in them, and additionally extract money through various tenders - warns Svetlana Cenić, economic analyst, for Patria.

And the recipe for extracting money from already struggling companies is simple. Public companies, such as city utility companies, get a job, for example, maintaining public lighting, but these jobs are done for them by other firms hired as subcontractors.

- If you look further, you will see that the owners of these subcontractor firms are in close relationships with the ruling political parties - says Cenić.

The Government of Sarajevo Canton recently extended the contract with KJKP "Park". This company will maintain public lighting in all nine municipalities of the Canton for the next six months. The job can be worth hundreds of thousands of KM.

However, one of the clauses in the contract already indicates that in case of a larger volume of malfunctions in the public lighting of Sarajevo Canton, "Park" will engage an external company.

A source of the Patria agency reveals that Park will engage a firm from Hadžići, whose owners are in friendly relations with the top management of Park.

- Park was awarded the job of maintaining public lighting in KS, even though Park itself operates at a loss and cannot fulfill the undertaken obligation. In fact, the ruling parties in KS deliberately awarded this job to the loss-making Park so that they could extract money from taxpayers through an external company - claims this source, who wished to remain anonymous.

This year, the authorities in the Federation of BiH will extract much more money through the multi-million loss-making Željeznice FBiH. The coalition of SDA, SBB, and HDZ-BiH has approved over 20 million KM of taxpayer money for them in 2016, as business assistance.

- When you work in a private company, you are obliged to justify every mark you spend. But that is not the case with taxpayer money. The most trivial example is riverbeds in local communities. Municipalities allocate huge amounts of money every year for cleaning rivers, but they are still full of bags and other waste. No one is held accountable for that - says Cenić, writes Patria.