Edin Forto, Minister of Communications and Transport of Bosnia and Herzegovina, welcomed the activities of the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the US Department of Finance (OFAC) with the aim of preventing violations or activities that pose a threat to the implementation of the Dayton Agreement, and especially with the aim of preventing corrupt activities.
Among the total of seven companies from Bosnia and Herzegovina that were added to OFAC’s list of sanctioned yesterday is Sirius 2010 – the holder of the Consortium which, based on an international tender, was chosen to carry out the second phase of the digitalization of RTV signals, the value of which is 25.8 million BAM excluding VAT .
Considering the new circumstances, Minister Forto ordered the Commission for Monitoring the Implementation of the Digitization Project to submit a statement from the Consortium on whether it is able to implement the general and special conditions with the tender documents in accordance with the signed Agreement, and to prepare a complete report on the implementation of the project. The Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina will be informed about the details of this report, with the opinions of the relevant institutions.
The contract with the Consortium, which consists of Sirius 2010 from Banja Luka and Odasiljaci i veze from Zagreb, was signed in January of this year on the basis of a tender that was announced during the mandate of the previous BiH Council of Ministers in mid-2022 and for which only two applications were received.
At the proposal of the Commission for Public Procurement for Digital Transmission and Broadcasting, in July of last year, a Decision was made on the only qualified bidder – the Consortium led by Sirius 2010.
After the final acts were passed by the BiH Appeals Office and the BiH Court, and based on the positive opinion of the BiH Attorney’s Office, a contract was signed with the Consortium led by Sirius 2010.
The previous attempt to conduct a public procurement for the digitization of RTV signals failed in 2017 when no qualified bid was received following a public call.
By signing the Geneva Agreement, Bosnia and Herzegovina undertook to turn off the analog television signal by June 2015 and is currently the only one in Europe that has not completed the digitalization of the RTV signal.
