Statement by the Minister of Finance, dr Igor Lukšić, on occasion of establishing Draft law on amendments and appendixes to the Law on Budget of Montenegro for year 2008

The Government had review, accepted and established Draft of amendments and appendixes to the Law on Budget and it shall be, after certain technical processing, forwarded to the Parliament, and the amendments are, predominantly, consequence of recently adopted Law on retired persons remuneration, which is a consequence or a result of the non-court settlement recently made.

Amendments and appendixes to the Law on Budget include granting additional funds, regarding the current segment of Retirement fund, as well as positioning certain funds with the objective to increase the item for debt settling, since the bonds are due as soon as October 2008. and shall be appropriate to the dynamics in line with the adopted law. Likewise, the debt settling item should include additional disbursements; regarding servicing old foreign currency savings based on two laws legislated in previous and current year, and is related to expanding the group of old foreign currency investors included in our legislation. The second reasons for making certain amendments and appendixes to the law is certain increase in capital budget, both in section for individual projects needing to be finished faster and for alignment of the things that were included in bidding procedures and therefore providing for those projects to be finished by the end of this year.

A logical reason for correction of the budget is also our decision to increase the rates for wages in courts, as well as the need to intensify the court institutions work prosecution offices and any other institutions of utmost importance for eliminating some delays, so in this manner it is necessary to provide the additional funds for their work on Saturdays. The important item, which is also going to be included in the budget and implemented in following months, is a Memorandum of Understanding, which will be signed by the Government with the Association of Unions, therefore implementing the agreements on solving the issues of certain number of employees as a consequence of transitional process implementation. This is a measure of remedying economic and social consequence of a very difficult process of transition from centralized planning to market economy. It is evaluated that the revenues of budget and funds should at the end of the year amount 1 billion 260 million euro, and disbursements approximately 1 billion 230 million euro, which leaves surplus of approximately 0.8%, which shows that the budget is well-balanced and that its further implementation shall contribute to decrease of debt.