Veselin Dutina made and canceled the contract with his brother’s company

The director of the Agrarian Fund of Trebinje, Veselin Dutina, entered into a direct agreement for the purchase of office furniture with the company owned by his brother, Nikola Dutina. The value of the contract is around 5,600 marks without VAT. The interlocutors of “Direkt”, which deal with research in the field of public procurement, agree – the law has been broken. The Agrarian Fund cancelled the contract after the information that it had entered into it was leaked to the public.

According to publicly available data, the direct agreement with the brother is also the first deal with public institutions of Nikola Dutina’s newly founded company “Master decor”, which will deal with the production of furniture for business and sales premises, kitchens and the like.

The company “Master decor” was registered on February 20 of this year. He concluded the contract with the Agrarian Fund, headed by his brother, company owner Nikola Dutina, on March 7.

Is it a conflict of interest?

Slobodan Golubović, the editor of the “Pratimo tenders” portal, tells “Direkt” that it is a gross violation of the Law on Public Procurement.

“The Law on Amendments to the Law on Public Procurement, which applies from December 2022, clearly defines that the contracting authority undertakes appropriate measures in order to effectively prevent, recognize, and remove conflicts of interest in connection with the public procurement procedure, and in order to avoid violations market competition and ensuring equal treatment for all business entities. Also, it is defined that the conflict of interest in public procurement procedures refers to relatives by blood in the direct line or in the collateral line up to the third degree, which is the case in this procurement”, explains Golubović for our portal.

Damjan Ožegović from Transparency International BiH also agrees with him. He also adds that the representative of the contracting authority was obliged to sign a statement on the existence or non-existence of a conflict of interest and to publish the list of business entities, with which the representative of the contracting authority is in conflict of interest, on his website or to announce that such business entities do not exist.

The Law on Public Procurement of BiH provides that this list is updated without delay if changes occur.

Golubović believes that in this particular case, there may be justifications for a smaller amount of money, considering that the procedure was carried out by direct agreement.

“However, practice shows that direct agreements participate with about 50% in public procurement procedures, which means that when we look at a longer period of time, we can talk about very large figures that can be misused”, says Golubović.

In addition, in this public procurement procedure, the legal conditions for its initiation have not been met, our interlocutor explains, because the Agrarian Fund has not published a public procurement plan.

“This procurement is not planned, given that the contracting authority has not published a single planning document on the Public Procurement Portal to date, which it was obliged to do, in accordance with the provisions of Article 17 of the Law on Amendments to the Law on Public Procurement”, concludes Golubović.