Kosovo Govt to Pay €1m for Serbs’ Electricity
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| North Mitrovica. Photo: Kallxo.com |
The government in Pristina decided on Monday to allocate one million euros to Kosovo’s Transmission, System and Market Operator, KOSTT public energy company to cover the energy expenditure of Serb-majority municipalities in the north of the country.
However, a solution still needs to be found to cover the full cost of the electricity used by the Serb-majority municipalities, which do not pay Pristina for their supplies.
Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj said the one-million-euro allocation was necessary so that KOSTT would be able to join the European network of transmission operators.
“It is a temporary decision but as such saves our network functionality and enables us to remain at the table to gain our right to become an operator in the network of transmission operators in Europe,” Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj said.
Since the end of the Kosovo war in 1999, the four northern Serb-majority municipalities have not paid Pristina for their energy consumption.
To make up for the shortfall, people from other areas of Kosovo had a percentage added to their bills to pay for the north’s electricity.
In December, the Energy Regulator’s Office announced that electricity bills will be reduced by 3.5 per cent as consumers will no more cover the cost of the four municipalities’ power as they have done for the past 19 years.
Pristina and Belgrade signed an agreement on energy in 2015 which obliges Kosovo to allow Serbia’s public energy company to establish a supply company within Kosovo.
But this company has not yet been registered and licensed by the relevant institutions in Kosovo, which is impeding the implementation of the agreement.
“They have applied three or four times so far… but are violating the agreement, which says the company should respect Kosovo’s laws,” Kosovo’s outgoing Minister for Dialogue Edita Tahiri told BIRN last August.
“When it submits its application, the company… has failed to write in its statute that it is operating in Kosovo,” she added.
Minister of Economic Development Valdrin Lluka said last year that the average costs of the Serb-majority municipalities’ energy was 8.7-8.9 million euros per annum.
However he said the cost in 2017 was “a little bit higher, almost around 9.5 and maybe by the end of the year it will be 10 million euros in total”.
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