The first meeting of representatives of the Ministry of Finance and candidates for ministers on the draft budget for next year, as well as on all issues important for the financial and economic state of the country, is planned for Monday, "Vijesti" has learned from both teams.
In Zdravko Krivokapić's government mandate team, the candidates for the ministers of finance and social care, economic development and capital investments are Milojko Spajić, Jakov Milatović and Mladen Bojanić, and the Minister of Finance Darko Radunović and his associates participate in the talks on behalf of the Government in the technical mandate.
The participation of the general directors of the Directorates of the Ministry of Finance for the State Budget, Treasury and Economic Policy and Development, Bojan Paunović, Dragan Darmanović and Iva Vuković, is planned, and other assistant ministers will be involved if the topics require it.
Draft budget
The Ministry of Finance announced that the draft budget for the following year was prepared within the legal deadline of October 30, but that they did not send it to the Government and then to the Assembly because the mandate holder announced the reorganization of the executive power.
Krivokapić stated that he will have a budget proposal by December 20, and claims that they could not get information from the Ministry of Finance about employment and related to the planning of the state treasury.
Radunović's department denied this and invited Krivokapić to a meeting, as well as to submit a draft regulation on the new organization of the public sector, so that the information system for planning and preparing the budget and connecting program activities would be adapted to the new organizational scheme in time.
The mandate holder announced that the government, which should be decided on December 2, will have 12 instead of the previous 18 ministries.
Krivokapić announced that they accept the invitation of the outgoing Government to provide them with information on the state of state finances, assessing that it is "the beginning of the long-awaited transition of power".
Candidates for ministers said that they expect the team of the Ministry of Finance to be cooperative and not obstruct.
They specified that "necessary information and presentation of the reorganization plan will be communicated in an adequate manner with representatives of the Ministry, if there is a genuine will to eliminate potential obstructions from that address."
The problems are getting deeper
The forecast of international institutions is that this year's decline in the Montenegrin economy will be around 12 percent, the European Commission's 14,3 percent, the Central Bank of Montenegro around 17 percent, the Institute for Strategic Studies and Projections (ISSP) between 15 and 17 percent.
The measures due to the coronavirus pandemic have increased the state's otherwise high public debt. Estimates from international addresses are that it will be over 90 percent of the gross domestic product.
The World Bank has forecast that the economy of Montenegro will have the strongest recession in the Western Balkans region this year, mainly due to high dependence on tourism, as well as that the public debt will at one point reach a peak of 98 percent of GDP in the next year.
The problem is also the growth of unemployment, the business of the majority in the economy is threatened or hampered, one of the most important sectors so far - tourism has been destroyed by the corona crisis... and the worrying epidemiological situation is not calming down. The Government claims in the technical mandate that they did everything to maintain state finances, and that the situation had improved before the pandemic.
The assessment of departmental candidates for ministers is that the fact that the recession in the country is one of the biggest in Europe was contributed, among other things, by the wrong economic policy of the previous government, which almost "put all the eggs of economic activity in one basket - tourism".
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