Institutions at all levels of government in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) have awarded more than 27.000 public procurement contracts to companies that supported the work of political parties through donations in some of the election cycles from 2018 to the present.
The total value of these tenders exceeds one billion BAM, and they were most often concluded in the areas of procurement of alarm monitoring services and security-related services, followed by restaurant and food service provision, and the organization of educational seminars.
Cross-referencing the asset declarations of politicians submitted to the Central Election Commission (CEC) of BiH and public procurement data shows that 19.8 percent of elected officials who state in their asset declarations that they own private companies have done business with the state through awarded tenders. This percentage amounts to 36.4 percent among officials elected in 2022, indicating a systemic problem of conflict of interest that deepens over the course of a mandate. The data, available on the Integrity Watch BiH platform, illustrate a high level of interconnectedness between political parties, their donors, and the institutions that manage the allocation of public funds.
One example of a contract that clearly illustrates this practice is the case of the Minister for Human Rights and Refugees of BiH, Sevlid Hurtic, against whom Transparency International (TI) in BiH filed a complaint for conflict of interest, because his private company had received contracts worth millions of BAM from budget-funded institutions. The Commission for Deciding on Conflict of Interest only determined, two years after the complaint was filed, that Minister Hurtic had been in a conflict of interest and imposed a sanction, even though in the meantime his company continued to indirectly participate in public procurements through other legal entities.
An analysis of more than 930.000 public procurement procedures over the past several years, conducted by TI BiH, shows that companies owned by one of the elected officials in BiH received 2.450 contracts in a single year, while more than two thirds, or 76.9 percent, of all awarded tenders were concluded through direct agreements with suppliers, that is, without the possibility of competition or participation by other bidders.
Political parties record the highest number of donations precisely in election years, while companies that received tenders account for around 10 percent of total donations to parties. This represents only a small portion of the funds that parties report, given that previous TI BiH research has shown that parties largely fail to report donations.
What is particularly important to emphasize is that data on ownership of business entities by politicians are limited only to elected officials who have submitted asset declarations to the CEC, and do not include appointed officials or all companies over which politicians exercise beneficial ownership by transferring ownership to third parties.
These phenomena are monitored by the Integrity Watch BiH platform, which enables a visual and analytical overview of public procurement procedures, searching of donations to political parties, as well as insight into the asset declarations of elected officials, all of which provide an overview of the mechanisms through which public resources are placed in the service of private and party interests.
These findings are just another of many pieces of evidence that, in BiH, as an example of a state whose institutions are captured, business success depends exclusively on connections with political parties and their leaders, who enable their donors and clients unhindered access to contracts through the public procurement system.
TI BiH calls on the media, researchers, and citizens to use Integrity Watch BiH as a tool which, by linking three different data sources – the reports of the Public Procurement Agency of BiH, the financial reports of political parties, and the asset declarations of elected officials – enables the identification of corrupt patterns and connections that have for decades captured institutions and undermined the budget of BiH, Klix.ba writes.
