Abuse of public resources for gaining electoral points

Transparency International Bosnia and Herzegovina (TI BiH) strongly disapproves of increasing tendency of abusing the public resources in pre-electoral promotion and appeals to political parties not to act irresponsible towards the taxpayers’ money, as they should represent taxpayers’ interests. Impelled by recent campaign of Elektroprivreda BiH and Federal Ministry of Energy, Mining and Industry, under the slogan „Nije kasno za bolji život“(„Not late for a better life“), which is obviously used for election campaign purposes, TI BiH sent to Elektroprivreda BiH request for information about public tender for conduction of the campaign, along with the criteria for the assessment, the best bidder and the price of agreed services.

Elektroprivreda replied that this company did not take part in planning the campaign and therefore did not finance it, remarking that information can be gained from the Ministry of Energy, Mining and Industry. TI BiH contacted Ministry in order to get abovementioned information, but Ministry did not reply, although the legal limit for providing the information has expired.

Considering the fact that Elektroprivreda, whose name is being used in the campaign is not familiar with any information about it, along with the statement of Federal Prime Minister, Mustafa Mujezinovic that the campaign is not financed from the Federal  budget and that the Government did not give its consent, conclusion is that in this case, public resources are being abused for the promotion of the political party, Stranka za BiH, whose member is minster of energy, mining and industry, Vahid Heco. Although TI BiH was denied the information, it will use all the legal remedies to get the insight into contract for campaign implementation, in order to inform the citizens complitely about the way their money is spent.

Financing pre-electoral campaigns out of the state budget is not only problem in Federation of BiH – after re-broadcasting the movie “Ponosni na Srpsku” (“Proud of Srpska”) by Republic of Srpska Government, which promotes the achievements of political party SNSD just before the beginning of the pre-electoral campaign, it became clear that the main purpose of this movie is glorification of Milorad Dodik, member of SNSD, who is a candidate for a president of RS in upcoming elections. Naturally, funds for this movie, which was broadcasted in prime-time on almost all the TV-stations in RS, were gathered from taxpayers’ money.

Irresponsibility towards the public resources also was showed by the political party SDA, that paid external workers through the service cooperative Peskara, which is not only unregistered, but according to findings of The Center for Investigative Reporting, several persons listed as workers never really had cooperation with SDA. Also, significant part of abovementioned resources never made its way to final users. TI BiH has already warned about the fact that Central Election Comission (CEC) or other institutions do no have any jurisdiction over control of the political parties’ expenditures, which enables parties to spend budget resources in an illegal way, just like SDA in abovementioned case.

Because of all this, TI BiH once again call for political parties to take responsibility towards citizens who elect them, and especially appeals to CEC, to whom TI BiH is going to send a request to investigate two abovementioned cases, to take an adequate penalization and to prevent further abuse of public resources by political parties and their representatives. Also, TI BiH invites all citizens to take these cases into consideration when giving their vote in the elections and to make their decision based on accountability that political parties showed in the previous period.