Bosnia's state and entity prime ministers met on Thursday for the first time after they assumed office, following the 2018 general election. They announced the first session of the three governments will take place at the end of January 2020.
Addressing a press conference, head of Bosnia's state government, formally the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Zoran Tegeltija, said they agreed to work towards the protection of domestic economy with the accent on agriculture.
“We agreed that the first session of the Council of Ministers and entity governments will be held by the end of January 2020. These meetings will take place once per year. The meetings of entity prime ministers and the Council of Ministers Chairman, with their cabinet staff, will still be held once in three months. Our next meeting is set to take place at the end of March 2020,” said Tegeltija.
The prime ministers of Bosnia's two semi-autonomous regions, Federation (FBiH) Fadil Novalic and Republika Srpska (RS) Radovan Viskovic, discussed the open issues including the legislation treating the value-added tax, European integration process, public administration reform and security issues.
“The Law on the Value Added Tax (VAT) is in the phase of adoption and has passed several steps. We decided to work with those who designed the law, with people from the Steering Board of the Indirect Tax Administration, and we will be dealing only with the key issues of the Law on VAT. That's the matter of the VAT rate, is there going to be a differentiated rate or not, the matter of payment deadline and the postponed VAT payment. We'll get a clear stance of experts on that, and then we will take firm stances,” said Chairman Tegeltija.
The focus of the future meetings, he said, will be on the improvement of the citizens’ lives.
Entity prime minister agreed that they opened a number of issues of both entities’ interests.
“These are, in my opinion, crucial matters. I am particularly glad that we have almost identical stances on most of these topics, without too many disagreements. I expect one significant number of these matters to be implemented in the first quarter next year already,” Viskovic said.
