The heads of tourist boards in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH), after the court forbade them to work, continued to charge taxes, which cost private companies hundreds of thousands of BAM, about which they are now asking questions of the local judiciary.
Enes Bunjo is not sure why he had to pay more than 110.000 BAM of his company’s membership fee to tourist associations to an organization whose work is prohibited. He says that he paid the money to the accounts listed in court rulings that he lost. But even today he is not entirely sure why the money went to tourist associations whose existence was declared illegal.
“We are aware that we will not get the money, but we believe that it is a high level of corruption,” says Bunjo, adding that he believes that the local judiciary is involved.
Bunjo’s money “disappeared” in a legal vacuum, when the old Cantonal Tourist Association was banned from operating. Research shows that the management of the community continued to collect money from tourist taxes several years after the tourist community and its accounts were supposed to be closed.
Moreover, Bunjo today, with the help of a lawyer, is trying to dispute why the Court in Sarajevo ordered that the money be paid to the account of the defunct Tourist Board, which should no longer be active, as well as to the accounts of the law firm that represented the Tourist Board. He says that for years he was not even aware that his company, which sells cars, had to pay tourist taxes, but he had to do it after the court verdict.
(Il)legal collection according to the established principle
In 2014, the Constitutional Court of the FBiH declared unconstitutional and incompatible with the Constitution of the Federation the Law on Tourist Boards and Promotion of Tourism of the FBiH, and all tourist boards from the territory of the FBiH became illegal and had to stop working.
After this verdict, Canton Sarajevo (CS) passed the Law on Tourism, and later the Decision on the establishment of a new Tourist Board of the Canton. The Board was registered in the court register in 2016. It was conceived as a successor to the old community, but in the new one, they say that they never received documentation from their predecessors.
According to the Law on Tourism of the CS from 2016, the new community was obliged to take over the rights, workers, and obligations of the previously defunct Tourist Board. But then problems arose for them because they did not take over the claims, so all the funds from earlier debtors have not reached their account even to this day.
The old mail arrived at the address of the new Tourist Board, and that’s how the current administration found out that the old board was still collecting claims. Instead of taking over claims, in mid-2017, the Assembly of the CS adopted amendments to the Law on Tourism of the CS and deleted the very article that refers to it.
From 2004 to the end of 2013, the old Tourist Board collected more than 30 million BAM in tourist membership fees and residence taxes, with an average annual income of more than three million BAM. This series and the collection of earlier claims should have been continued by the new Tourist Board.
Although the old Tourist Board in nature initiated these proceedings, it lost legal subjectivity under the Tourism Act and they should have ceased to exist, explains the lawyer of the current Tourist Board, Elmedina Bojicic.
“Consequently, its legal successor is the new Tourist Board, which was supposed to complete these procedures and pay the costs awarded after the completed procedures to the account of the new Tourist Board, because the old one does not exist,” she says, Detektor reports.
E.Dz.
