Bosnia and Herzegovina is facing serious institutional blockages in the process of adopting key laws, which has direct consequences for the country’s European path and economy.
Among the most important problems is the non-adoption of the Law on the Regulator, Transmission and Market of Electricity, due to which, according to estimates, the state loses up to half a billion convertible marks annually.
This law, as stated, was on the agenda of the House of Peoples of the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina as many as 14 times, but it was never considered due to the lack of consensus on the seat of the electricity exchange. Federalna.ba.
Losses due to lack of law
Since the new year, Bosnia and Herzegovina has been paying penalties to the European Union for failure to adopt the Law on the Regulator, Transmission and Market of Electricity, i.e., failure to establish a mechanism for adjusting carbon dioxide limits in electricity production, better known as CBAM.
They are also under attack in the sector of renewable energy sources. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, there are more than 2,500 such power plants with a total power of about 1,500 megawatts, in which approximately three billion marks have been invested.
“If we had established this law, with this amount of energy produced, based on the certificate, we could earn up to half a billion marks annually, which Bosnia and Herzegovina loses due to the absence of this law”, said the president of the “Buy and use domestic” association, Admir Kapo.
Azrudin Husika, a professor at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Sarajevo, pointed out that the absence of a stock exchange directly affects the market and electricity costs.
“The non-existence of the stock exchange greatly affects the costs, that is, the inability of our producers, as well as consumers of electricity, to get the most favorable offers,” said Husika.
A political agreement without a solution
Hundreds of millions of marks mean nothing if there is no political agreement. Even two laws are in circulation – one proposed by the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina with the stock exchange headquartered in Mostar, and the other adopted by the House of Representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH, which provides for the headquarters in Brčko District.
Chairman of the House of Peoples PSBiH Kemal Ademović has repeatedly proposed that any of these two laws be included in the agenda, but Dragan Čović is now against both – and that on principle.
“It is disputable for him to say that they had an agreement that the headquarters would be in Mostar, and the House of Representatives, as he interprets it, adopted a different solution because ‘someone played rough in the House of Representatives,’” said Ademović.
On the other hand, Dragan Čović, deputy chairman of the House of Peoples of PSBiH (HDZ BiH), said that moving the headquarters of the stock exchange is not realistic.
“Everyone who is carried away that we will move the place of electricity trading from Mostar to Brčko is mistaken, it simply will not happen,” said Čović.
Economy and political blockades
Personal interests should not be above the economic consequences suffered by the economy and investors. There are also no technical reasons for insisting on the specific location of the stock exchange, experts explain.
“It is unfortunate that we have come to a situation where we are losing tens of millions of convertible marks due to the inability to export and due to such an expensive kilowatt-hour, just because of whether something will be in Mostar, Sarajevo, Banja Luka or Tuzla. This is a passive attitude of politics,” said energy expert Amer Jerlagić.
Now we have a situation where the kilowatt hour exported from Bosnia and Herzegovina is almost twice as expensive as the one we would pay without the tax. From the Secretariat of the Energy Community, they clearly said that there is no looking through the fingers and they expect the adoption of the law just as the ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina promised them. However, the above does not mean anything to domestic political actors, as long as the established practice of blockades does not have consequences for them.
