Chinese companies submitted three bids for the construction of the “Buk Bijela” hydroelectric power plant in the Republika Srpska (RS), worth around 250 million euros, confirmed Milan Bastinac, Assistant Minister for Energy of the RS.
According to the agreement on the establishment of the joint enterprise Hydroelectric Power Plant Gornja Drina between Serbia and RS from 2020, in addition to “Buk Bijela”, the construction of two more hydroelectric power plants on the rivers Drina, Foca, and Paunci, in the east of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is planned.
How did the job negotiation go?
Everything was done at the invitation of the company “Hydro-Energy System Gornja Drina” (HES Gornja Drina), a joint project of Elektroprivreda RS (ERS) and Serbia, which own 49 and 51 percent of shares in HES.
Milan Bastinac, Assistant Minister for Energy of the RS, also the Chairman of the Board of Directors of hydroelectric power plant Gornja Drina, says that the Chinese companies were chosen because of their “reputation and experience on similar projects in Serbia and RS”.
He also claims they did not need to call for a tender to invite Chinese companies, assessing that the Law on Public Procurement of BiH allows them to do so.
Moreover, Bastinac pointed out that there was no public invitation under the Law on Public Procurement, because “nominally, the project is carried out by a foreign company”.
“We have no obligation to act according to the Law on Public Procurement because the majority capital is a foreign company, that is, in this case, a company from Serbia (Elektroprivreda Srbije). Accordingly, we were not obliged to carry out the public procurement procedure,” Bastinac explained.
Doubts about the transparency of the project
Awarding large jobs to Chinese companies, without public insight into the contents of the contract, has become a practice in the RS, according to Transparency International BiH (TI BiH).
Damjan Ozegovic, from this organization, says that Chinese companies are mostly chosen through direct negotiation procedures or self-initiated offers, eliminating competition.
In this way, he believes, data from contracts that are paid for with public money are concealed without the possibility of insight into what and how it is spent, Slobodna Evropa reports.
