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SARAJEVO, October 17 (FENA) - A series of evident and practically confirmed irregularities in the legal framework in content and technical terms when it comes to financing political parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina has been recorded, according to the analysis of the Coalition for Free and Fair Elections "Under the Spotlight" (Pod lupom).
The analysis, containing over a hundred pages, has numerous data on ways to finance political parties, donors and costs, and it provides a visual representation of that data.
Program Director of the Coalition, Dario Jovanović, said that a third of the parties did not submit post-election financial reports on the campaign for last year's general elections, with campaign costs amounting to KM 9.6 million.
“Almost 70 percent of political parties' revenues come from budgets of different levels of government, which means that citizens mostly finance political parties,” Jovanović added.
The analysis showed that political parties spend most money in the category "Other Propaganda Expenses" - 26 percent of the total expenses of all political parties are these expenses, which makes KM 2.5 million.
Nineteen state and entity level parliamentary political parties, which are part of a separate sample for analysis, have generated KM 13.8 million, while their expenditures are KM 17.6 million and are KM 3.8 million higher than recorded revenues.
Jovanović adds that these 19 political parties account for a total of 88 percent of the revenue generated by 69 political parties that participated in the 2018 general elections.
“Parties that have the largest amounts of money are the ones who win the most votes and seats in elections for state and entity parliaments. Popularly said "You get what you pay for",” said Jovanović.
Talking about legislative framework in this area, he emphasized that laws and regulations are outdated, incomplete, of insufficient scope, and prescribe extremely low sanctions that are stimulating for possible offenders and are violated in practice without adequate consequences.
He recalled that the Group of States Against Corruption of the Council of Europe (GRECO) made nine recommendations to the BiH authorities concerning the improvement of financing of political parties, of which only one was implemented satisfactorily.
The Coalition has issued 12 recommendations for improving the area of political party financing, including the need to revise the legal framework, increase fines for violators of law in the area, increase "certainty of punishment" and prevent the misuse of public resources for election purposes.
The Coalition also proposes abolishing the possibility of contributing in cash and respecting the obligations of doing business through a single transaction account in the bank, and the authors of the analysis note that implementation of these recommendations would improve system of financing political parties in BiH.
The interactive web application presented today about the cost of the election campaign for the 2018 general election is the first of its kind and provides insight into the financial analytics cards of 19 political parties that are parliamentary at state or entity level.
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