Riinvest Institute 2014

5 Republic of Kosovo. Ministry of Finance 2013. “Law on Budget 
2013. Macroeconomic Framework 2013-2015”.
6 GAP Institute 2013. “Kosovo Budget– Transparency and 
Forms of Budget Reporting”.
The sixth problem derives from the lack of public in-
formation about the taxes on natural resources Koso-
vo; or royalty tax. The institutions still leave the public 
in complete darkness regarding information on the 
course, linkage, and tax expenses of these kinds of 
taxes throughout the years of exploitation of - mainly 
– underground resources.
Finally, the seventh problem, relates to the descrip-
tion of government goals on spending, which usually 
appears in the macroeconomic analysis part of the 
budget. This goal and this analysis continues to ap-
pear only as an additional document of political rea-
soning, which tries to argue on the political and party 
basis, instead of showing a proper economic and in-
formative analysis, primarily for the members of the 
parliament, and then also for the general public.

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10
n
For several years now the general public has been 
concerned with the issue of energy and its future; in 
the “laboratories” that projected the development 
of this sector, there have been tried out almost all 
options and ingredients, all development models, 
however, the concept was wrong: they always tried 
to come up with a “product” that basically burns 
coal! They represented one-way attempts by the 
Kosovar government and their international consul-
tants, bilateral and multilateral offices that tried to 
“discover” the true formula for the Kosovar energy. 
All these initiatives had a lot in common: (1) they 
were dictated by international consultants, some-
thing that pleased the Kosovar politicians dealing 
with the sector, (2) they all saw salvation exclusively 
in the development of thermo-based energy relying 
on coal, (3) and they all were completely non-trans-
parent to the public until they had to be presented 
in front of the Parliament to give way to these ini-
tiatives.
The lack of transparency in major projects, that had 
a value of over 4 billion euros, has surely always 
generated lack of accountability for accounts made 
arbitrarily. In all development options that were pre-
sented to us, at the end of the day the bill will be paid 
by the citizen, through taxes that in the future will 
be allocated to fix the harmed environmental and 
health situation, which according to the World Bank 
study sum up to 350 million euros per year.
7
Why do 
we declare that the energy sector was among the 
least transparent sectors and consequently show 
no accountability to the citizens?
If we refer to the last decade, when the big plans to 
“save” the Kosovar economy began by building a 
2100 MW PP, and up to this day, we see that the 
information was only shared with citizens when 
pushing different building alternatives, or when in-
ternational tenders were opened, which had to be 
transparent. How the models of construction were 
selected, how we were certain that these are the 
best models, how we selected the location, how we 
prepared financial accounts, were never given out to 
the public. The law was violated, parliamentary pro-
cedures were violated and the international norms 
were violated
8
, without hesitation. The law was vio-
lated, which requires development versions of major 
(energy) projects to be discussed in public before a 
decision is made to continue. This never occurred!