Citizens are paying the price of the harmful contract with Milbauer, BiH will be without passports on March 21!

BiH Minister of Security Dragan Mektić expressed concern today that BiH will still be without travel documents after March 21 and that the contract signed with the company Milbauer is harmful to BiH, writes the BiH news agency Patria.

- An incredibly harmful contract for BiH, and we have no chance as a country to get out of it in a short period. The contract for identity cards with Milbauer was concluded through a tender, and the price per identity card is 16 KM. The contract was signed for ten years, and in addition to ten years, they are cumulatively tied to about 12 million of these forms. If you don't take these 12 million in those 10 years, the contract is extended until that quota is met. And no one knows, this contract could last 13, 15 years. We have to fulfill the annual quota because IDDEEA is obliged to procure over a million forms from Milbauer, while the needs are around 300,000, and the contract value is 100 million KM.

Mektić said that this is incredible criminal activity at the expense of citizens, because they are the ones paying the price for this harmful contract.

- The real price of this document is from 1 to 1.5 euros. To make matters worse, in order to trap the country in this mess, they separately announced a tender for travel documents for passports and designed it in such a way that a key machine that produces color images in polycarbonate remained with Milbauer, not with IDDEEA, so for every travel document, you have to deliver the form to Milbauer – said Mektić.

The Minister of Security said that the offered price is unrealistic, intended to suppress competition, but they compensated for it with the price of identity cards.

- We have been drawn into criminal activity, and we are paying the price of passports and identity cards on the backs of citizens. I told the Council of Ministers that we should shift the burden of the harmful contract to the budget to reduce items, not to shift it onto citizens. You cannot get out of this. How can we get a new competitive company when they are going below the real price of passports because they have a difference of 7 euros on the price of identity cards.

Mektić specifically addressed the BiH Prosecutor's Office, urging them to conclude the investigation into Milbauer.

- Get into this crime, uncover this crime. It's not rocket science. I worked in investigations for 30 years; this is not difficult to prove. You have contracts, you have documentation; it was done to the detriment of the state, the entire state, and all citizens. They don't need any time, and they can uncover it very quickly – said Mektić.

The investigation into the procurement of personal documents began in 2014, and it is intended to determine how the Banja Luka-based "Milbauer" obtained this contract, at a time without any references, even though negotiations were held with the German consortium "Milbauer".

The contract for the production of identity cards and driver's licenses, worth almost 104 million marks, was awarded to the German company "Milbauer Roding" through a negotiated procedure, without a public notice and without the obligation to form a company in BiH.

According to media reports, the Banja Luka-based company "Milbauer" has a 40 percent ownership stake held by the company "Nites", owned by Miodrag Škrbić and several other individuals who have been linked by the media to Zlatko Lagumdžija and Milorad Dodik.

At the time of signing the first contract, the head of Banja Luka's Milbauer was Danilo Petković, the son-in-law of former BiH Presidency member and high-ranking SNSD official Nebojša Radmanović.

According to the audit report, the IDDEEA's negotiated procedure with a single bidder, in this case, Banja Luka's "Milbauer", called into question the transparency and efficiency of the procedure.

It was assessed that the procurement of an electronic chip for identity cards at eight convertible marks (almost four euros) is not realistic, given that they cost around 1.1 euros per supplier invoice.