SDP demands urgent sessions of governments and parliaments at all levels due to price hikes

SARAJEVO, (Patria) - The Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been warning for months about the detrimental effects of adopting excise duties, due to the fact that the direct consequence of rising fuel prices will be a chain of price increases, which will worsen the already poor social picture of our country and further undermine the living standard of the population, the SDP stated.

- At that time, representatives of SDA, HDZ and SNSD claimed that this was not true, that we wanted to block the huge investments that only they could see, that we wanted to scare citizens because there would be no price increases.

Yesterday, citizens could once again see who was telling the truth and who had lied to them for who knows how many times. The policy of the excise coalition (SDA, SBB, HDZ, SNSD and HDZ 1990) was demonstrated in practice, as we witnessed fuel price increases greater than those foreseen by the law, which is a new robbery of the citizens of this country orchestrated by those whom these citizens elected.

The additional explanation we heard from the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the entity governments, that the planned excise duties will not be used for the construction of new highway sections, reveals the criminal nature of this government, which for months promised that adopting excise duties was the key to launching investments.

Once again, it was confirmed that we were right from the beginning, when we pointed out that this was a combination of fraud and robbery of citizens. Today it is completely clear that the praise from representatives of the international community was, in fact, only because they saw additional guarantees for loan repayment in the introduction of excise duties. The lack of their reaction to such statements by domestic officials shows that they also knew this and consciously participated in this deception all along.

Although it is difficult to expect those who devised this robbery to react now, we want to try once more to awaken the conscience of those within the government who still have at least a little conscience. Therefore, we demand that governments at all levels urgently convene sessions with a single agenda item: "consequences of price increases and adoption of measures to mitigate and nullify the effects of price increases".

Given that the entire process of impoverishing citizens, during the procedure of adopting the law, was backed by five persistent parliamentary sessions, we demand that extraordinary sessions of state and entity parliaments be convened to analyze the effects of price increases on the living standard of citizens and to adopt concrete measures to mitigate the effects of price increases, especially on the poorest categories of the population, such as the unemployed and pensioners with minimum pensions.

We expect inspection bodies to actively protect citizens in the period ahead through the legal instruments of supervision and price control available to them, and to regularly inform the public about their activities.

We call on the competent prosecutor's offices to investigate and determine as soon as possible whether the introduction of additional excise duties contains elements of a criminal offense, given that today it is clearer than ever that this was a case of conscious fraud, lies and abuse of position - the SDP said.