At its last session, the House of Representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina (PABiH) adopted the proposal of Damir Arnaut, delegate of Our Party-Nasa Stranka (NS), which drastically reduces severance pay for politicians when they retire. Currently, the amount of severance pay exceeds 34.000 BAM, and according to this proposal, it would be reduced to one-third. Elected and appointed officials and senior civil servants are currently allowed by law to receive, in addition to high severance pay, a pension and a salary, BHRT writes.
”I have suggested this several times. The last time, this law proposal has passed in the House of Representatives was in January 2020, and, sometime in the middle of that year, it fell in the House of People. Then I decided to propose this law again when three members of the House of Peoples – Mr. Spiric, Mr. Izetbegovic, and Mr. Covic – took the severance pay the same day, continued to receive a salary the next day, and began, also from that day, to receive a pension, so three things,” Arnaut explains, adding that this is, in fact, a personification of this government.
The law proposal will now go to the House of Peoples, and Arnaut expects it to be on the agenda of the next session.
”We’ll see if there will be a little more will now, after they took it, but I’m not an optimist, to tell you the truth. Considering the control package that SNSD and HDZ have in the House of Peoples, which the SDA gave them, I think the result will be the same again.”
”When I first proposed this, at the end of 2019, I wrote in the explanation of the law that, according to my most conservative assessment, and this is what I found on the website of the Parliament and the Council of Ministers, the age of all these people, elected, and appointed officials, at least 17 of them will meet the conditions and thus get this fabulous severance pay in this term. That is, according to conservative estimates, about 500.000 BAM. These are, indeed, unimaginable figures, especially for the citizens. When you look at it, one of those severance pays is some 80 minimum pensions,” Arnaut adds.
”We recently had a meeting with representatives of the trade unions of the Indirect Taxation Authority, ie taxpayers. A large number of their employees who collect VAT, from which this country lives, have salaries of some 600 to 800 BAM, and their base has been reduced several times. These people, when they receive severance pay, it literally eases that transition path from their salary, although small, to an even smaller pension, and then that severance pay somehow comes to bridge that period. In particular, everyone knows that a few months pass before the paperwork is finished, so pension begins to arrive. While we have an absurd situation here, that these are people who receive huge salaries, who do not even need any transition, because of those huge salaries that they have been receiving for decades – Covic, Spiric, and Izetbegovic have been in politics since before Dayton, and definitely after Dayton, in the highest positions. And they then start receiving huge pensions the next day, and then they take another 35.000. A policeman and a soldier receive five thousand, a maximum of those severance pays. That is why my proposal is not to touch the severance pay, but to reduce these maximums to the amount of some 10.500 BAM,” Arnaut emphasizes.
His proposal, Arnaut explained, applies not only to members of parliament and members of the Council of Ministers but also to every civil servant, from the position of assistant minister to the those of higher rank. According to him, these are leading civil servants and elected appointed officials, which is over 200 people.
E.Dz.
