Vicious Circle: How the KS Prosecutor's Office, the Privatization Agency, and Politicians Destroyed "Feroelektro"?

The agony of 47 workers of „Feroelektro“ shows no end in sight, as today they could not even enter the „Feroelektro“ building, confirmed for the Patria news agency Senad Smajić, the president of the union of this once successful company.

Smajić states that on Monday they could enter the building's hallway, but today they cannot even do that, and they have called the Federal Administration for Inspection Affairs, which will submit a report next week. On the verge of exhaustion and frozen, Smajić recalled the main culprits for the destruction of „Feroelektro“.

- First and foremost, it is the FBiH Privatization Agency, headed by Rešad Žutić while he was there when the privatization was carried out, the Municipal Court in Sarajevo, which has been dragging out the case for years, and judge Lejla Fazlagić, who kept it in drawers for six years, scheduling countless preliminary hearings and making deliberate procedural errors so that the entire case would be dismissed at the Cantonal Court and returned to the initial stage – says Smajić.

He states that their desire is for the law to be implemented, the truth to be proven, and for the workers to be enabled to work normally and live from it. The workers' ordeal began back in 2004, when in mid-January 2004, more than 60 percent of „Feroelektro“ shares were sold for one million euros to the company „Stanić-Invest“. By the purchase agreement, Stanić-Invest was supposed to invest about 12 million euros in „Feroelektro“ within three years from the date of signing the contract, and to employ an additional 200 workers. However, the opposite happened. The number of workers was reduced from the then 167 to 47. Salaries were reduced to minimum, and contributions were not paid.

But the new owner Goran Stanić did not stop there. He began stripping the assets of „Feroelektro“, with the tacit approval of certain people from the FBiH Government, who, as Patria learns, urged the Court in Sarajevo to cover up the case and keep it in drawers.

- The intentions of the buyer Stanić are clear: to free the building of workers and, in the following years, to outmaneuver the state to take possession of the building and to sue the state, abusing the slowness of the judiciary. There is also a mortgage on that building by „Stanić Invest“ for alleged loans of over four million marks. That mortgage was also the subject of investigations by the Financial Police, and the illegal Supervisory Board made that decision, and the meeting was not even held as shown. There are many things here that are all stalling – explains Smajić.

The president of the „Feroelektro“ union is also angry at the Sarajevo Canton Prosecutor's Office, which has not even completed the investigation into the criminal complaints filed in 2008.

- The Cantonal Prosecutor's Office in Sarajevo should have acted much faster, because there is a report on a committed criminal offense by the Financial Police from 2008, and they still have not resolved it, let alone the new ones from 2012 – added Smajić.