Announced the Information on the Owners of Oil Industry of the Republic of Srpska

In 2007, TI BiH requested from the Government of the RS to disclose the names of owners of three companies whose 60% of ownership stake is in possession of a buyer of a Russian company NefteGazInKor- Invest Technology, Nepat and Unique Development, which were registered recently before the privatization process. TI BiH and public have never received this information, which creates space for doubts that the majority owners of the Refinery are not the Russian companies or the Russian Federation, as it was presented in public, but that they are in the highest level of the Government of the RS that conducted the process of criminal privatization or individuals closely associated with the regime.

Six years ago, TI BiH identified 44 disputable clauses of the contract of privatization of the Oil Industry and found that the Government of the RS bought back the Refinery’s previous debts, settled court liabilities of the company, underestimated the real value of the company, and entered in the credit obligations provided by the NefteGazInKor in a non-transparent way. Thereby, the Government of the RS had initially damaged the budget and redirected over a billion KM of taxpayers’ money to the private accounts of unknown people. On the other hand, the former refinery operational profit amounted to less than 500 million KM, bringing the entire property of the Oil Industry of the RS into the hands of the same unknown buyers, who, in this way, managed to get the whole industry in their ownership with all the privileges and preferential treatment that has since been effective.

The claims of TI BiH about continuous money laundering have been confirmed in the report of the audit firm “Deloitte” for 2013, which has shown that the accumulated loss of the Refinery is bigger than 500 million KM, and that the debt is two times bigger than the profit of the company.

Privatization of the Oil Industry through direct negotiations, management of the Refinery, and the privileges that the Government of the RS gave to the buyers and the Refinery itself, as well as the facts that the information on the owners of firms in majority ownership in NefteGazInKor has been kept as secret for years, lead to a conclusion that the main goal of the privatization was enrichment of the individuals from the shadow who robbed one of the largest companies in BiH. From 2007 and on, TI BiH has urged the Government of the RS to disclose the information on the owners of the Oil Industry in the RS without further delays.[:]