International Women’s Day, Bugojno, 2024, at the Alibey Motel, a bill of 914 BAM was racked up and paid with public money by the Minister of Defence, Zukan Helez. Alongside food, the bill included 60 beers, 22 shots of pelinkovac, 11 glasses of white wine, and a bottle of Vranac Procorde — over a hundred alcoholic drinks in total.
Minister Helez justified the expense with receipts and an official note stating he had attended a meeting and working lunch with 11 representatives from women’s associations in the Gornji Vrbas region and Canton 10, as well as the Gender Centre of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH).
However, most of those invited said they were not with Minister Helez that day.
From 2018 to 2024, nine government ministries, the General Secretariat, and the Office of the Chair of the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina spent 7.14 million BAM of public money on official hospitality.
CIN journalists have access to only a portion of these bills — totalling 578,000 BAM — which show that much of the Council of Ministers’ hospitality budget is spent on alcohol in taverns and restaurants across the country and abroad, justified as expenses for meetings with colleagues, working lunches, or official dinners.
The ministries provide little detail on the purpose or outcomes of these meetings, and internal controls are weak, so the actual verification of bills is carried out only by auditors from the Audit Office of the Institutions of BiH.
Each year, auditors warn about irresponsible spending on official hospitality and recommend clearer rules for accounting public funds, yet institutions rarely follow their advice.
The Grey Area of Spending
The law allows government officials to spend public money on food and drinks at hospitality venues — funds allocated for so-called official hospitality, available to them every year. In addition to ministers and their deputies, in the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH CoM), the chairperson, the general secretary, sector heads, and anyone authorised by a minister can also access these funds. They can spend between 60,000 and 500,000 BAM per year.
The Council of Ministers’ rules on spending for official hospitality, introduced more than ten years ago, state that public money may be used for food and drinks in hospitality venues as necessary to maintain official and business contacts and to host guests.
Officials are required to justify their expenses with signed fiscal receipts and submit reports explaining the purpose of meetings. However, in over a thousand pages of documents reviewed by the Centre for Investigative Reporting (CIN), details on the reasons for spending are often missing.
Even the evidence from the Bugojno Alibey Motel is unclear. Minister Helez’s note claims that a meeting with representatives of government authorities and NGOs took place in early March 2024. Yet officials from the Government and Assembly of Canton 10, as well as the associations from the area, told CIN that they did not hold any official meetings with the defence minister.
The same response came from the Gender Centre of the FBiH: “We did not participate in the mentioned meeting. (…) We are not responsible for the level of institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
CIN contacted representatives of four women’s associations from Canton 10 and the Gornji Vrbas region, and all denied attending the meeting. The remaining representatives could not be reached at their listed contacts.
According to the bill, 914 BAM was spent on food and drinks at the Alibey Motel, including 90 alcoholic drinks and roughly 3.5 litres of wine. The minister later reported that 11 people attended the meeting.
Between 2021 and the end of 2024, the Ministry of Defence spent 997,176 BAM on official hospitality. CIN journalists reviewed part of the documentation and concluded that around 20 percent of the money spent went on alcohol.
An analysis of bills from spring 2023 to the end of 2024 shows that Minister Helez, among other expenses, paid for over 1,000 spirits and beers and around 27 litres of wine. Most of the bills were issued in his hometown of Bugojno.
Some of these included meetings with representatives of demobilised war veterans, though CIN journalists could not verify exactly who attended. In February 2024, he signed a note claiming to have met representatives of sports associations for war veterans in the Central Bosnia Canton (SBK) at the Babilon restaurant. It was a Saturday, and the bill of 202.50 BAM included 19 alcoholic drinks alongside the food. Six people attended the lunch.
The president of the Central Bosnia Canton (SBK) Association of War Veterans, Ekrem Julardžija, said he did not attend the meeting.
“All activities related to sports for people with disabilities are organised through the SBK Association of War Veterans, as we do not have sports associations for the disabled at the cantonal level,” he told CIN.
A few months later, in the summer of 2024, Minister Helez signed off on expenses for food and drink at two meetings with, as he reported, demobilised fighters in Busovača. On the first occasion, he used public money to pay for a mini feast with a bottle of wine and 15 beers at the Fehro restaurant in Busovača, costing 132 BAM. Fifteen days later, he covered a dinner with 34 beers and six bottles of cherry brandy for 406 BAM.
“He did not meet with my organisation or our board, and we had no meetings,” said Hrustan Lušija, a representative of the Organisation of Demobilised Fighters of the 1992–1995 Defence and Liberation War in Central Bosnia.
CIN journalists also contacted representatives from two other veterans’ associations in SBK, but none confirmed attending meetings with Helez.
Details on the purpose and outcomes of these discussions are missing from the expense documentation reviewed by CIN journalists.
While ministry regulations do not prohibit spending on alcohol, the Audit Office of the Institutions of BiH considers such expenses inappropriate.
Even within the Ministry of Defence, no one has scrutinised Minister Helez’s hospitality expenses.
While an institution can refuse to approve an expense it deems careless or inappropriate, this rarely happens.
Helez also recorded in his notes that he met with pensioners and demobilised soldiers, without providing further explanation. For example, the Ministry holds a bill for a meeting with “25 pensioners” in September 2024, totalling 496 BAM. According to the bill, by 3 p.m., attendees had consumed 84 beers, wine, and 10 spirits. At another meeting with “retired military personnel,” drinking continued until midnight — 15 shots of Jäger, 28 beers, and 1.8 litres of wine. Alcohol was also plentiful at a meeting with demobilised senior officers. Ten people consumed three bottles of wine and 39 spirits. Drinks flowed freely in mid-2024 in Karakaj, where a meeting with three demobilised fighters saw a bottle of “Gorki list” liqueur, eight beers, and a glass of wine consumed.
More premium drinks were consumed at a late-April 2024 meeting in Bugojno between the minister and the management of “Binas,” “Pretis,” and TRZ. Nine people drank 29 glasses of Chivas whisky, 21 shots of Jäger, a bottle and nine glasses of wine, and six beers.
All these expenses were approved, and the use of public funds was justified. It is unknown whether any of these meetings produced tangible results.
Minister Helez declined to comment for CIN. He ignored calls via the Ministry for months, and during a meeting on official business in Igman, he said: “We’ll see each other another time!”
Wine and Rakija at Košarac’s Mediterranean Evening
Rules allow officials to spend official hospitality funds abroad. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Minister of Foreign Trade and Economic Relations, Staša Košarac, frequently travelled and spent in the region.
Documents provided to CIN journalists by the Ministry show he met with Serbian government ministers, the BiH ambassador, and members of the Republika Srpska delegation in Serbia.
Ministry records indicate that in 2024 alone, he visited Belgrade around ten times, spending 6,755 BAM from the state budget on official hospitality — most of which cannot be linked to specific expenses.
Košarac also did not clarify costs from March 2023: after opening the “SET Trebinje 2023” Energy Summit, he travelled to Montenegro and, just after 10 p.m., used public funds to pay a bill of nearly 500 BAM at a popular beach bar in Herceg Novi, which included a bottle of “Malvazija Kozlović” wine and eight rakijas. The expense note gave no details on who he was with or the purpose of the meeting.
In the last weekend of May 2023, Košarac met in Belgrade with Miloš Ković, a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, historian, and defence expert for Ratko Mladić at The Hague tribunal. Ković had been banned from entering BiH in early 2022 for being deemed a threat to national security. It remains unclear why the Minister of Foreign Trade met with him to discuss “lifting the ban,” as stated in the expense justification. The two also dined and drank in Leskovac, spending 322 BAM from the state budget.
At all these meetings, food and drinks were ordered, and Košarac often used public funds to pay for alcohol — 7,924 BAM of the total 106,382 BAM reviewed by CIN journalists in the Ministry.
Like Helez, Košarac ignored all CIN requests to discuss the money he had spent.
In early June 2024, he signed off on two bills totalling nearly 2,500 BAM. A small portion of the expenses was supported by a receipt from a Belgrade restaurant, while the majority was spent at a hotel, with no details on what was purchased.
On the same day, Košarac posted on his Instagram that at the Republika Srpska Representation in Belgrade he had met with the director of the Investment-Development Bank and an expert from the Green Climate Fund (GCF) to discuss “accrediting Republika Srpska as an implementing entity for the Fund.” On the same day, he also posted that he had met with the head of the Representation to discuss the “All-Serb Assembly.”
“Our goal is to support the efforts of Republika Srpska’s institutions in further developing and strengthening their capacities,” wrote Minister Košarac on his profile.
Regardless of the content of these meetings — which the Ministry did not question — all these expenses were paid from the state budget. This includes 964 BAM from a “meeting with entrepreneurs from the town of Nevesinje” the day after the 2022 General Elections, where, among other things, 89 rakijas were consumed. CIN journalists contacted nine entrepreneurs from Nevesinje, one of whom said the meeting “might have happened,” while the others denied it.
As with the Ministry of Defence, the state audit office has repeatedly noted issues in the Ministry of Foreign Trade: “An audit of external hospitality expenses has revealed certain irregularities, including expense claims without written justification or a clearly defined purpose, as well as weaknesses in internal controls when using business cards.” Despite these warnings, the situation has not changed.
The Ministry’s internal audit unit has not reviewed hospitality expenses or their justifications. Over the past five and a half years, 328,574 BAM has been spent from this budget line.
Honey and Wine
In more than a thousand official hospitality bills, officials most often described food and drink expenses vaguely as “working meeting,” “working dinner,” or simply “hospitality,” mainly in the Office of the General Secretary and the Chair of the Council of Ministers.
From a review of bills between 2020 and mid-2024, just over 160,000 BAM was justified in this way, signed off by Secretary Robert Vidović, former Chair Zoran Tegeltija, and current Chair Borjana Krišto. Just over one-tenth of this amount was spent on alcohol.
Tegeltija used public funds to pay for two lunches at the “Bob-exclusive” restaurant on Trebević ahead of the New Year 2023, totalling 2,465 BAM. The bill included 19 bottles of wine, 30 rakijas, 16 beers, and five bottles of liqueur and brandy. No details were given on the number of attendees or the reason for the gatherings.
Auditors have repeatedly warned that the internal control system in the General Secretariat is inadequate and that it must be improved — a change that has yet to happen. Their warnings specifically target vague and insufficient explanations for the food and drinks consumed across various restaurants and taverns.
It is also unclear how Secretary Vidović could spend 400 BAM on honey at “Apihum” in his hometown of Ljubuški and 982 BAM on 60 bottles of wine at the “Buntić” Winery. Like the ministers, he has avoided speaking to CIN journalists or explaining to the public the purpose of these expenses.
Government ministers and their deputies in the Council of Ministers of BiH enjoy a range of material privileges granted by laws and regulations. Their average monthly salaries range from 4,000 to 6,200 BAM. They receive allowances for living away from home if they commute to Sarajevo from distant locations, paid accommodation, official cars with drivers, covered travel expenses, and guaranteed severance pay upon retirement.
CIN has already reported on abuses of these perks, all of which occurred due to broadly defined rules on spending, with no clear limits or guidance on how expenses should be justified — such as those in the 2014 Official Hospitality Rulebook.
“The Rulebook allows the use of practically anything available in a hospitality venue,” says Darko Kasap from the Office of the Coordinator for Public Administration Reform, adding that the Rulebook should be improved along the lines of EU countries.
“To start with, we need to specify exactly what they can spend on when it comes to official hospitality, because, cumulatively, these are significant amounts that cost society,” says Srđan Traljić of Transparency International BiH.
Such changes have not yet been made, and the Ministry of Finance and Treasury of BiH has not responded to journalists’ inquiries on the matter, ignoring the recommendations of state auditors.
“Even if you said 50% was spent for legitimate purposes, 50% is still a large amount not used correctly. So, this is something that effectively became a private expense, paid for with citizens’ money,” says Dževad Nekić, former Chief Auditor of the Audit Office of the Institutions of the Federation of BiH.
