Transparency on Macan's arrest: We hope this case will not end with an acquittal either

Former director of the BiH Agency for Identification Documents, Records and Data Exchange (IDDEEA) Siniša Macan was arrested this morning in Banja Luka.

He is charged with abuse of office and irregularities in the process of selecting the company Muehlbauer, which was chosen to participate in the production of personal documents for the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The affair is worth over 100 million KM.

Ivana Korajlić from Transparency International told the Patria news agency that she is pleased with Macan's arrest, but will only be fully satisfied if this case ends with a conviction. Unfortunately, some earlier proceedings against high-ranking officials in BiH, responsible for millions in crime, ended with acquittals.

- This Muehlbauer issue has been ongoing for several years, and we pointed out irregularities from the beginning. We support that something has finally started to be done regarding this case. However, considering previous experiences with the arrests of key individuals in key institutions in the country, which later ended without consequences, without final verdicts, it is difficult to predict now whether this will be the case on which the success of the prosecution and courts in BiH will be demonstrated – says Korajlić.

- Unfortunately, so far we have had too many spectacular arrests in front of the media, which have not yielded any results, so now citizens, even when they see someone arrested, doubt it.

Korajlić reminds that in just the last few months, several people who are key in the banking sector of Republika Srpska have been arrested, and before that, similar arrests occurred in other areas, but almost none of those proceedings ended with a conviction.

Muehlbauer is a huge affair, in which public funds were spent in a suspicious manner. Korajlić says she hopes that the judiciary, using the Muehlbauer affair as an example, will restore the trust of the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, writes Patria.