(Podgorica, 2 February 2012) – Montenegro’s citizens will come out to protest once again in order to show Prime Minister Igor Lukšić that they want concrete actions instead of further stories or vague promises.
It would be nice if we could believe the Prime Minister’s recent statements that citizens where the first priority for him and that he isn’t interested in tycoons. Unfortunately, his own actions speak otherwise. There are many examples of where his priorities actually are, while everyday people continue to witness increasing costs.
When confronted, Lukšić often attempts to blame the decisions of the previous government (of which he was a part) for current policy failures. At the same time, Lukšić has not attempted to make any serious break from the policies that led us to the brink of bankruptcy; only altering his rhetoric while continuing to actively pour money from the pockets of citizens into the pockets of tycoons.
One of the more obvious examples is the on-going debacle at the Podgorica Aluminum Combine (KAP), where Lukšić is now proposing to resolve the “inherited” problems of the country’s largest aluminum manufacturer by paying some €22-million of tax-payer money to cover the debts of the private owner [Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska].
Conveniently, the Prime Minister neglects to mention that he was at the head of the Ministry of Finance when it decided to forgive KAP some €30-million in taxes, bills and contributions owed to the state.
According to the KAP Settlement Agreement, which was concluded in late 2010, the Ministry of Finance – headed by Lukšić at the time – waved €13-million owned for payroll contributions, €500,000 for health insurance, and over €1-million in taxes on the personal incomes of employees belonging to the relevant municipal authorities.
The Ministry of Finance, headed by Lukšić, also renounced other claims that KAP owed on the basis of a Settlement Agreement signed with the Electric Power Company of Montenegro (EPCG) for electrical energy worth another €6-million.
KAP also received an exemption from paying some €7.5-million in corporate income taxes in 2006 and 2007 and nearly €500,000 in interest payments for the non-payment of taxes to the Tax Authority (again, all under the auspices of then Finance Minister and current Prime Minister Lukšić).
Now the Prime Minister is suggesting that it is because of ‘inherited problems’ and the global economic crisis that we should be paying tens-of-millions of euros more to cover the debts of KAP’s owners.
Lukšić knows very well what has been happening at KAP and at the EPCG, at Montenegrin Telekom and at the Nikšić Steelworks. He also knows what he should order investigated, but it’s an open question as to wether or not something concrete will be done.
Only Lukšić knows why his Ministry spun around a €1-million transaction 11 times, thus enabling the First Bank (Prva Banka) to claim having “returned” a significant portion of the government bailout money for shoring up its liquidity at the onset of the crisis. The Prime Minister also knows which enterprises with ties to tycoons failed to pay electricity bills and how the EPCG came to be owed €120-million in unpaid dues.
The Prime Minister also knows that none of the “foreign, renowned auditors” that undertook audits of privatized firms found anything illegal in those transactions. Instead, these reports always showed that contracts were being upheld and that there was no corruption or kickbacks in these deals – in spite of evidence to the contrary. Lukšić should also be familiar with the fact that the “independent” auditing report on Montenegrin Telekom’s privatization failed to reveal whose sister had benefited from the deal – a fact that had to be revealed by American investigators [Note: the Securities Exchange Commission found Deutsche Telekom and its wholly owned subsidiary Magyar Telekom guilty of setting up false consulting deals worth millions of euros with offshore firms in order to bribe key government officials and secure the privatization of Montenegrin Telekom, including a deal with the sister of the former Prime Minister].
Since the Prime Minister already knows all this, then there is no need for him to try to blur our vision with working groups and independent auditors, to attempt to politicize the issue, as he wants to do with the controversy surrounding the Regulatory Agency for Energy.
In the end though, when he thinks the cameras are off, Prime Minister Lukšić has been revealed as laughing at and mocking citizens’ groups, believing that his “convincing” speeches are able to divert attention away from the country’s concrete problems. For this reason we call on all citizens to attend the next planned protest and openly mock Lukšić’s own attempts to manipulate the public. Let us demand exactly what the European Commission is calling for: concrete actions and results in the fight against corruption and organized crime. Otherwise we’ll only continue paying the costs of corrupt policy decisions.
