PALE MUNICIPALITY: To whom is the tender for the purchase of business premises arranged?

At the beginning of April this year, the municipality of Pale announced a tender for the purchase of office space for the needs of the Center for Social Work in Pale. The value of the purchase, i.e. office space, is 230,769.23 KM without VAT, and what is interesting are the conditions set by the contracting authority, more precisely the Municipality of Pale.

The Centre for Social Work must be in the city centre?

Business premises for the needs of the Center for Social Work should be “in the centre of the City, not far from the Health Center, the Police, the Municipality, the Tax Administration, PIO and other institutions with which the Center has direct cooperation. For the sake of orientation, the premises should not be more than 500m from the Post Office located in the Center”.

“From the tender documentation related to this procurement, it is evident that the target are business premises in the centre of the municipality, which are a maximum of 500 meters away from the Post Office,” Slobodan Golubović, editor of the “Pratimotendere.ba” portal, tells SPIN Info and adds that from this criterion it is possible to conclude that there is a high probability that only one bidder can offer business premises in that area, which speaks of discrimination against other potential bidders who may have business premises for sale, but are not within 500 meters of the Post Office.

For almost two months, we have been waiting for an answer to the questions related to this public procurement from the municipality of Pale, but it still hasn’t arrived, after all, this local community has persistently ignored the questions that come from the address of our portal for years.

However, SPIN Info has checked with detailed research which locations correspond to certain unspecified conditions in the Procurement Notice. Analyzing business premises located in the centre of the city, 450 m from the Post Office, the characteristics correspond to the new residential and commercial building of the investor “Stanišić” d.o.o., owned by the Stanišić family.

Aco Stanišić is a prominent member of DEMOS, owner of the company “Stanišić” d.o.o., director of “Elektrodistribucija” Pale, and is related to the mayor of Pale Municipality, Boško Jugović.

The purchase of real estate is exempt from the application of the Law on Public Procurement

Apart from the fact that the almost “drawn” space with the discriminatory conditions set in the Notice may correspond to the business space in the Stanišić building, the managers of the municipality of Pale in charge of public procurement did not know, or deliberately predicted, that real estate lease contracts are exempt from the application of the Law on Public Procurement.

Article 10 of the Public Law clearly states exemptions from the application of the law, so it reads: “A contract for the purchase or lease of existing buildings, other immovable property, land or rights arising from them, with any financial means, with the obligation of the contracting authority to ensure transparency and procedures, with the fact that the procurement of financial services for the purchase or lease of existing buildings, other immovable property, land or rights arising from them, at the same time, before or after the purchase or lease agreement, in any form, is subject to the implementation of one of the procedures defined herein by law”.

The Agency for Public Procurement commented to SPIN Info that due to the open public procurement procedure decided upon by the municipality of Pale, practical problems may arise in the application of this type of procedure, because the character of the procurement of immovable property is fundamentally different from the procurement of goods, services and works.

“For this reason, in the process of public procurement of goods, works or services, the criterion of a distance of no more than 500 meters from the headquarters of the contracting authority would certainly be discriminatory, while in the procurement of immovable property, the contracting authority could use this criterion because it is an objective indicator of its need, which again clearly proves that the contracting authority made a mistake when choosing the procedure, that is, it decided to conduct a public procurement procedure for a procurement subject that is exempt from the application of the Law”, the Agency informed us.

And in order to ensure the transparency of the procedure itself, it was necessary to make a Decision on Exemption, which would certainly attract more attention than the public procurement procedure itself.

The Center for Social Work in Pale already has conditional premises for work, moreover, a year or two ago they expanded the space in which they are located, and also carried out interior decoration.

“They have used one space for 30 years, and since last year they have been using another, they have put in PVC carpentry and floors, it is really conditional and beautiful, plus they have expanded the space they are using, i.e. they have increased the square footage of the space which is also municipal, so they have no the need to buy new space in addition to making a profit for the company ‘Stanišić’ d.o.o.”, says our source well-versed in the work of the Center.

Millions from the municipality of Pale for the company “Stanišić” doo

At an approximate distance from the one described in the tender, there is a new business-residential building “Stanišić” doo, which also includes business premises for shopping, and considering the price, it indicates that it corresponds to this “drawn” tender.

Since 2016, when SNSD staff member Boško Jugović took over the management of the municipality, the company “Stanišić” doo has received as many as 78 tenders from this local community. In the end, it is over 2.2 million marks (2,211,500.98 KM). In addition, as SPIN Info previously wrote, the location where the Pale Heating Plant is to be moved, for which almost two million KM of budget funds have been spent so far, is planned on Stanišić’s land.

The company “Stanišić” doo, 78 tenders of the Municipality of Pale since 2016.

It remains unclear why business premises must be purchased in an election year, given that the Center for Social Work has renovated the premises. It seems that this year the Center will help the rich more and less those in a state of social need.