Claims of the President of the Board of Directors of the Electric Power Company of Montenegro (EPCG) Srdjan Kovacevic, that until the end of last year leadership the company was not aware of the strategic consulting agreements that the A2A partner outside of the tender process makes with its affiliated companies, are more than hypocritical and in essence are brutal untrue. That is stated in the letter which Kovacevic sent to the Committee on anti-corruption on yesterday’s control hearing “
Kovacevic now claims that he learned, in October last year, and from “non company’s” sources, about consulting contracts from A2A from 2012. year, which in that year amounted to 2.5 million euros, after which in November last year he made familiar about that the Privatization Council, and supposedly Committee Director of EPCG in February of this year.
Claims of Kovacevic are brutal lies, whose only goal is to exculpate the Montenegrin representatives from the Board of Directors for many years of illegal operation of the state energy company, whereby the consultant contracts of the A2A only a part of a series of contentious actions made at the expense of EPCG, measured in millions of euros.
The EPCG in the financial report for the year of 2012, showed expenditure for procurement of goods and services with related companies A2A, that are in 2011 amounted to a total of about five million, while the Research Center of MANS knowledge of these jobs published in July of last year, which was one of the first publicly available information about a concrete topic.
Back then MANS announced that the EPCG in the financial report for 2011, hid debts for the purchase of goods and services from related company A2A in the amount of 2.5 million euros, and it explicitly appears for the first time only in the financial report for the year of 2012, in which in parallel are presented new expenses with associated companies A2A for that year, amounting to an additional 2.5 million.
Even then we have expressed doubt that the EPCG fictionally portrayed these expenses, because transactions with related companies are known recipe for pulling out the money, so we publicly asked the question what kind of goods and services A2A can purchase for the state energy company when it has special department for legal affairs and corporate governance.
Meanwhile, and the minority shareholders in EPCG presented their findings that the A2A with related companies made contracts without tender, and from EPCG in late August of last year, was delivered the opinion of the Commission for Public Procurement (from September 6th, 2010) signed by former director Marko Lazarevic.
In that opinion, the media reported, is stated that “EPCG is not bounded to apply the rules on public procurement in direct jobs with the A2A company and its daughter companies”. This document has never been officially released, nor it was yesterday submitted to the members of the Committee on Anti-Corruption, whose session did not attend the representatives of the Commission, but the Public Procurement Office.
All these data negate Kovacevic’s claims that from the outside of company’s sources he allegedly got familiar about consulting contracts with A2A, and such claims submitted in official letter to the representatives of the supreme legislative home not only mislead the members of the Parliament, but in one hand and insulting.
MANS has recently released updated information regarding business with A2A, actually said that it was the Government itself, once during negotiation process for the recapitalization of EPCG, enabled the Italian partner that in the statute defines a special provision which allows signing of consulting contracts with affiliated companies.
In the Board of Directors of EPCG four representatives of the state and three representatives of the Italian capital, and since 2010 to the present days the Government’s representatives were Srdjan Kovacevic, Miodrag Canovic, Nikola Martinovic, Boris Buskovic and Miodrag Radonjic, and these people are most responsible for the protection of national interests in the energy company.
MANS invites the new Public Prosecutor to urgently check business of state energy company, not just when it comes to consulting jobs with A2A, but also its businesses with the First Bank, and electricity import and export.
Ines Mrdovic
Coordinator of Research center in MANS
