The District Prosecutor’s Office in Trebinje has issued an order not to conduct an investigation against the management of the Gacko Mine and Thermal Power Plant (RITE Gacko), which has been awarding million-dollar contracts to Optima Group for years without any public bidding. Transparency International in BiH filed a criminal complaint in February 2021, as this public company awarded contracts for fuel procurement worth 29.5 million marks to Optima Group through 22 negotiated procedures.
In addition to TI BiH, the Public Procurement Agency of BiH provided the prosecutor’s office with “information on gross violation of the Public Procurement Law” by RITE Gacko for the same case, but only for one procedure worth 1.3 million KM. The District Prosecutor’s Office in Trebinje decided
It should be recalled that RITE Gacko has failed for years to conduct a successful tender for fuel procurement, denying other bidders the right to participate in the procurement, and from 2015-2021, as many as nine open procedures were annulled. In the same period, contracts were awarded through negotiated procedures to Optima Group, although these can only be applied in exceptional cases prescribed by law. The management’s explanation was often “extreme urgency caused by unforeseeable events” because their tenders were repeatedly overturned by complaints from dissatisfied bidders. However, from the case analysis, it is completely clear that the management has been causing these “unforeseeable events” for years, which has been concluded multiple times by the Office for Consideration of Complaints. The Prosecutor’s Office states that it has heard witnesses and concluded that there is nothing disputable in such conduct because the complainant who could not participate in the procurement suffered “no damage”.
-By procuring goods in this way in the specific case, no damage was caused nor was the right of another seriously violated, because if the Contracting Authority had not procured the goods in question in the then stated and only possible way, it would have come into a situation where RITE Gacko would suspend the production process, which would have had unforeseeable consequences for the public interest and damage to the company itself, states the prosecutor’s decision.
The Prosecutor’s Office obviously did not seek an explanation for the fact that in six years, an open public procurement procedure for fuel was not successfully completed, and that “urgency” cannot be justified by reasons caused by the management of RITE Gacko. What’s even worse is that this practice continued for years after the criminal complaint was filed, as from February 2021 to the end of 2023, RITE Gacko awarded Optima Group another 21.1 million KM through 10 negotiated procedures and without any competition.
That these procedures are being carried out illegally and that the reasons for extreme urgency cannot be proven in this way was warned by the then Chief Auditor of Republika Srpska eight years ago. TI BiH believes that such conduct renders the very existence of the Public Procurement Law meaningless because despite the fact that over 50 million KM has been illegally spent, which has been confirmed by auditors, KRŽ and the Public Procurement Agency, judicial institutions see nothing disputable in all of this. TI BiH has previously pointed out that due to the lack of reaction from the judiciary, more and more public companies are avoiding conducting public bidding for million-dollar contracts, either through illegal use of negotiated procedures, annexing expired contracts, or even completely exempting themselves from the application of the Public Procurement Law.
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