(Podgorica, 9 June 2013) – A number of workers from privatized Montenegrin companies have contacted MANS in the past week outraged by the government’s decision to raise the VAT to cover the debts of the Russian owned Podgorica Aluminum Combine (KAP). The workers who contacted us spent years trying to reclaim their rights and prevent the systematic closure of their privatized enterprises. The state, unfortunately, has turned a deaf ear to their appeals and requests, while continuing to listen to the appeals of ‘strategic investors’ (always at the workers’ expense).
Workers in privatized enterprises have witnessed a series of totally non-transparent and corruption-laden bankruptcy procedures, including the total physical destruction of their factories. Some citizens had the ‘luck’ of ‘only’ seeing their factories padlocked and asset stripped (accompanied by occasional reassurances that the factories would be reopened shortly). Workers were thus left without jobs, without severance packages, as well as the without payroll contributions. The biggest tragedy was that the Government approved these maneuvers by the strategic investors it had selected; going a step further in the case of KAP by also pledging to guarantee its suspicious debts.
Assistance should eventually be directed towards workers who remained without jobs following privatization and who failed to recoup the arrears owed to them. KAP workers should obtain what they are requesting and their jobs should be protected, something that should go for all similar workers in other privatized companies.
We believe that the VAT increase won’t help preserve jobs nor secure the payment of arrears owed to the workers. This is proven by the behaviour of the KAP’s Russian owners, who since the onset of privatization – and in spite of enormous concessions by the government – dismissed a large number of workers. From the above, one can conclude that only the debts created by KAP’s owners are being returned. We definitely still don’t know where all this money went, though we can be certain it didn’t go into the pockets of KAP workers.
For this reason, we believe that it is better to ensure that the money, which Russian investors are planning to give for the return of their suspicious debts, will be directed to KAP workers and other privatized companies, which could then begin a new life and job – instead of using workers as the source of pouring money into the coffers of Russian tycoons.
