Bosnia’s House of Representatives decided on Tuesday to ask the Council of Ministers to annul a public procurement procedure regarding the purchase of a building by the Indirect Taxation Authority from a company owned by the best man of Bosnia’s Presidency Chairman.

According to Branislav Borenovic, the leader of the Party for Democratic Progress (PDP), one of the opposition parties in Bosnia’s Republika Srpska (RS) entity, the Indirect Taxation Authority chose the only company that applied for the procedure, Grand Trade – owned by Mile Radisic, the best man of the Serb BiH tripartite Presidency member, Milorad Dodik.

Borenovic was one of the MPs who submitted the initiative to annul the procedure, and it passed in the House of Representatives because the amount of 98.5 million Bosnian Marks that was offered was much higher than the 37 million Bosnian Marks in total the Indirect Taxation Authority could spend on the construction of its new main office and regional centre.

Borenovic explained that a public announcement was made for the purchase of “existing facilities with such specific characteristics that only one company applied for the competition.”

“We ask the Council of Ministers to annul this public procurement and stop something that could cost the citizens of this country a huge amount of money,” he said.

A total of 21 MPs voted for the initiative, six were against and seven abstained.

Borenovic called the public procurement procedure “another attempt of robbery.”

According to Mira Pekic, from the Democratic People’s Alliance (DNS), the Indirect Taxation Authority did not even register one building that would suit its needs since 2013 and “after nine years it turned out that only a building worth nearly 100 million Bosnian Marks could suit them.”

She added that the initiative, which she submitted along with Borenovic, saved the citizens 60 million Bosnian Marks.