Bosnian central bank board members sacked by president

Two members of the Bosnian central bank’s five-member board have been sacked by the country’s presidency, according to locally-based reporters.

Both Bosnia’s presidency and its central bank are governed by arrangements put in place at the end of the country’s bitter civil war in the early 1990s. The arrangements agreed by the Dayton peace treaty give equal representation to the country’s three main ethnic groups: Bosniaks, who are mainly Muslim; Croats; and Serbs.

Bosnia’s three-person presidency is jointly held by one member from each ethnic group. Locally-based reporters say that the Serb member of the presidency, Milorad Dodik, demanded the dismissal of two Serb members of the central bank board. According to the local reports, the Croat member of the presidency voted with Dodik to dismiss the two board members.

Local media sources have named the two sacked board members as Ljubiša Vladušic and Trivo Marinkovic. The central bank’s board consists of the governor, Senad Softić, and four board members. Three assistant governors and a chief audit executive also have senior roles within the bank.

The Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina has not yet made any public statement on the matter or responded to questions from Central Banking.

Both of the dismissed board members were appointed by the presidency to six-year terms at the board in June 2015. They both have lengthy careers as senior officials working on financial matters.

Ljubiša Vladušic worked on resettling refugees during the early years of postwar reconstruction before being appointed a vice-governor of the central bank in 1997. He held that role until 2009, and served from 2010 to 2012 as an adviser to Bosnia’s financial markets supervisor. From 2012 onwards, he has been head of the economics faculty at the University of East Sarajevo.

Trivo Marinkovic worked as a tax and customs official when Bosnia was being rebuilt after the civil war, and is a senior adviser to the country’s tax administration. He has also held a number of senior roles advising international organisations, including the World Bank.

It is not clear why the presidency dismissed the two board members and, in particular, why a Serb politician moved against two central bankers from the same ethnic group. Several senior officials who worked with the International Monetary Fund, speaking to Central Banking, have praised the quality of the central bank’s senior employees.

In particular, the officials have said that senior central bank personnel have made considerable efforts to work with and behave impartially towards other ethnic groups. This has been no easy matter in Bosnia since the end of the civil war in 1995.

There may be political repercussions over the move by the presidency. The law governing the central bank was imposed on Bosnia by the international powers, led by the US, which negotiated and enforced the Dayton Peace Agreement.

International donors remain extremely significant in Bosnian politics and may object to the dismissal of the board members. Dodik recently refused to meet with the German ambassador to Bosnia, accusing her of being “anti-Serb”.