“This is a warning about the consequences of the absence of a system solution and the possible permanent shutdown of your public service. Without an urgent decision by the competent institutions, BHRT faces the blocking of its account and the cessation of its basic function public service in the interest of citizens,” BHRT said today.
The deadline that the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) gave BHRT to pay the debt, which with interest amounts to 22 million BAM, expires tomorrow, and they clearly indicated in that letter that they will go for the option of freezing or blocking BHRT’s account until that debt is paid, said the acting of BHRT general director Belmin Karamehmedović in the special show “Don’t turn off BHRT”.
“Given that they did not receive any offer from the EBU from the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina that would be satisfactory to enter into some talks with them, we can expect that after tomorrow’s date they will initiate a court decision on the freezing of accounts. This will give us some more time until the procedures are implemented, but that time may be a month or two and after that it is definitely the end of BHRT as we know it,” warned Karamehmedović.
“Less than a month ago, we had a similar show in this studio. After that show, absolutely nothing happened in any sense, except that BHRT receives lawsuits from workers for unpaid contributions every day. The courts execute these lawsuits according to an urgent procedure. We have already had blocked accounts four or five times this month. The luck in the accident is that the numbers were not so large that they prevented us from doing our work, so among other things, we managed to provide citizens with the monitoring of the Winter Olympics in a way that we diverted the funds earmarked for a hot meal to the workers to pay for TV rights,” notes Karamehmedović.
“We really don’t panic, we’ve been talking about our problem for years, so far nothing concrete has been resolved in a way that respects the law. We are the only ones who respect the law on public broadcasters, but unfortunately it seems that we live in a country where those who respect the law get the better of them,” said Karamehmedović in a special show about the future of BHRT.
