Magazinović explained: How much more expensive are airline tickets purchased by BiH institutions than their market price

(Patria) - SDP MP in the BiH Parliament Saša Magazinović published a video on his Facebook profile explaining how tenders are conducted in state institutions and airline tickets are purchased at a higher price than the market price.

- Tenders are conducted to make procurement transparent, get a cheaper price and better goods or services. And that it is not always like that, I will demonstrate to you with the procurement of airline tickets for institutions. In short, tickets are paid more than their market price - said Magazinović.

According to his findings, the tender is awarded to the one who offers the lowest personal profit per ticket, the so-called agency commission.

- OK for the commission, but how do we know if the price of the ticket itself is realistic? If you want to compare the ticket prices of different agencies, you have to do it at the same time you receive the offer because you cannot see past prices in the system.

In the past two months, my associates and I, in parallel with the offers from the company selected to procure tickets for one of the institutions, simultaneously collected offers for the same tickets from travel agencies across the country.

For 60 tickets, we received parallel offers from 15 agencies. Result: each ticket was more expensive than it normally costs. On average, by 345 KM.

Overall, the value of the tickets for which an offer was received from the selected company was over 100,000, and on the market, it cost about 20,000 KM less.

If we know that all institutions conduct tenders for airline tickets in the same way - everything is clear to you - Magazinović added.

He says that he will therefore send an initiative to the BiH Parliament to task the Audit Office of Institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina to audit the purchase of airline tickets in all institutions, including the content and manner of conducting tenders.

- This is where what I can do ends. But I hope that others, for whom this is their job, unlike me, will take steps to stop the practice where, instead of the cheapest option and quantity discounts, you get something completely different in a tender.

If they want a solution, following the example of some other countries, they will form a department that will buy tickets for all institutions in BiH. I say, if they want to... - concluded Magazinović.