Intervention due to the blocked tender for dialyzers in FBiH has been officially requested

Transparency International Bosnia and Herzegovina (TI BiH) appealed to the BiH Public Procurement Agency to intervene within its powers due to the blockade of the tender for dialysis consumables (dialyzers), which was recently reported by Fokus.ba.

WRITTEN BY: A. DUČIĆ

This information has been confirmed for our portal in TI BiH. We remind that our portal has revealed a potential affair that also has elements of a crime. Namely, the Institute of Health Insurance and Reinsurance of the FBiH has not announced a procurement for dialyzers for more than two years, although it was obliged. The Ministry of Health of the FBiH stopped the realization of this tender by its inaction.

And since then, among other bidders, companies representing Fresenius Medical Care BiH, including Melcom Ltd. from Mostar, have been selling the company's dialyzers at disproportionately high prices, leading to multimillion-dollar losses in the Federation because some dialyzer types in FBiH have prices are three times higher than, for example, in Serbia and Croatia.

On the other hand, the company Melcom, which is the distributor for Fresenius Medical Care (FMC), has on several occasions since 2017 thwarted tenders with its complaints, which were accepted by the BiH Complaints Review Office. The last time that happened was on September 11, 2019, when everything on this issue was blocked.

– In your text, you have united almost all the facts relevant to this case, and as for our recent address to the institutions, it is a request for monitoring the public procurement procedure sent to the BiH Public Procurement Agency and a report to the FBiH Administrative Inspectorate. Namely, since ZZOiR has not published a public procurement procedure for almost two and a half years, we turned to the competent Public Procurement Agency to examine the reasons within its authority because the Public Procurement Law is clear that these goods must be procured using one of the procedures provided by the law, and that the annexation of an existing contract is not a possibility – and ZZOiR due to the inaction of the Federal Ministry of Health found itself in the situation that it is forced to annex the last concluded contracts to ensure smooth dialysis processes for patients in the Federation of BiH – Damjan Ožegović told Fokus.ba, senior researcher at Transparency International BiH.

Furthermore, as Ožegović stated, they addressed the FBiH Administrative Inspection with information about the non-implementation of the procedure and stated that ZZOiR requested the Ministry's opinion in a timely manner and that it urged the request seven times, but never received an opinion, for which they also have written acts of these public bodies.

– The administrative inspection should investigate why the correspondence between the two public bodies does not work, and why in the end public funds suffer and patients remain uncertain about the delivery of much-needed consumables – dialyzers – said Ožegović.