BOSNIAN-SERB leaders abused their power by lavishly furnishing a new local government building with a €25,000 conference table, ashtrays costing €660 each and a waste-paper basket worth €880, anti-corruption investigators in the Balkan state allege.
The €110 million government complex in Banja Luka, the capital of Bosnia’s Serb-run republic, is at the centre of claims that prime minister Milorad Dodik and several allies massively overspent public funds and handed lucrative building contracts to their friends.
The findings of federal investigators, which were seen and publicised by the Sarajevo-based Centre for Investigative Reporting, claim Mr Dodik’s administration also bought furniture at a discount but charged the Bosnian taxpayer the full amount.
Mr Dodik, who regularly clashes with western officials and leaders of Bosnia’s Muslim-Croat region, rejected the allegations and accused his political enemies of trying to besmirch his reputation among Bosnian Serbs, who on average earn just €400 a month.
“Everything was done according to the law,” he said. “This building was a necessity for Republika Srpska . . . It’s our pride.”
Mr Dodik previously said he did not recognise the authority of the prosecutors handling the case, and that he built the complex, which opened 18 months ago, in the hope his critics would “drop dead”.
Srdjan Blagovcanin, head of anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International in Bosnia, said: “The fact that the report exists and is submitted to the prosecutor’s offices is good news for citizens of Republika Srpska and Bosnia-Herzegovina. This report and what will follow will show that nobody is above the law.”
The Bosnian-Serb leadership is widely seen as a stumbling block to greater integration in Bosnia, which was divided into two “entities”– Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation – by the Dayton accords that ended the country’s 1992 to 1995 war. Mr Dodik has opposed the transfer of power away from the regions to the federal centre in Sarajevo.
