Urgent and Important: Excise duties lose SBB's support too, does it still make sense to send the proposal to Parliament!

Lobbying for support for amendments to the set of laws that would enable an increase in excise duties on fuel and petroleum products has started again, and now stronger than the previous five times when every attempt ended unsuccessfully, writes the Patria News Agency.

Although lobbying is ongoing, it is uncertain whether excise duties on oil and petroleum products will increase in BiH, or more precisely, it is increasingly certain that the increase will not happen, because Fahrudin Radončić also said that SBB will not support the increase and that it is an old story for them. Therefore, SDA, HDZ, and SNSD are left without the votes of SBB MPs, and earlier four MPs from this party in the House of Representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH supported the urgency of the law as well as the proposals themselves.

However, a turn of events has clearly occurred. It is increasingly certain that the excise duties will fall again (if the Council of Ministers dares to send the proposal), which will be a defeat for the coalition itself and for SDA, which, in addition to losing three MPs (Senad Šepić, Salko Sokolović, Sadik Ahmetović), has now lost a coalition partner, because Radončić also said that he would leave the government when SDA finds a new partner.

Ambassadors of European countries are disappointed with such an outcome of SDA's governance, and according to diplomatic sources, this particularly applies to Denis Zvizdić, the Prime Minister of BiH, who failed to find a majority for the increase in excise duties, nor did he bother to explain to the MPs in the BiH Parliament what an increase in excise duties would really mean and what BiH would gain from it. Everything was done forcefully, all attempts to pass the laws under an urgent procedure failed.

The Council of Ministers proposed an urgent procedure due to the deadlines defined in the Letter of Intent with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and in addition to excise duties, amendments were to be made under an urgent procedure regarding payments to a single account and distribution of revenues, and the indirect taxation system in BiH. However, all deadlines have been missed and the desired result has not been achieved, which makes Zvizdić's persistence in proposing the laws again under an urgent procedure surprising.

Additional revenues from excise duties would, as claimed, be used for the construction of highways and roads, and this would enable the activation of already concluded loan agreements with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the Kuwait Fund, and the OPEC Fund, as well as the continuation of the arrangement with the IMF.

At the end of March, the Council of Ministers of BiH, by a majority of votes, determined the proposals of these laws, and the law was not voted on by ministers Mirko Šarović and Igor Crnadak, both members of the Alliance for Change, because they requested that this new levy of 15 feninga ensure a minimum level of protection for those who will be most vulnerable, namely farmers.