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| Jusuf Azemi in a press release today |
Many companies are unfairly benefiting from the Emergency Fiscal Package and this scandal needs to be stopped.
This is what the chairman of the Independent Trade Union of the Private Sector, Jusuf Azemi, said today, where according to him, there are abuses on the distribution of these salaries.
"The scandal that has taken place must be stopped and in some form passed with the least possible consequences. Many companies that provide services to state institutions, which have not had their activity stopped, have been compensated according to the contract where the same have made a request for their workers from the package to be supplied with salaries of 170 euros. A large part of these companies have benefited from this fraud and a large part of the workers have been paid a salary of COVID-19 with a value of 170 euros. If the government has thought to compensate these workers, the company has been obliged to transfer the inviolable salary from the Kosovo Government to the workers", said Azemi.
According to him, there are companies that have applied without the right to benefit from this package.
"Here we have negligence, but perhaps we can say and it has happened deliberately that the workers who did not meet the salary from the Emergency Package, the Government of Kosovo, without properly controlling the documentation has poured the funds to the worker. We also have other companies that throughout the period with a tempo as much as they have worked. Here these companies have unfairly applied for their workers to enjoy the 170 euro package. Workers are pushing them to sign contracts for 170 euros, with the aim of paying part of it to the government. In this case, maybe millions of euros in the funds of the owners of the company, but not the workers", he said.
As of Tuesday, there are about 152,000 employees of various private companies in Kosovo who have applied for salary compensation in the Tax Administration, in order to benefit from the Emergency Fiscal Package.
And the number of businesses that have applied to benefit from this package is 36,548.
Regarding the delays in the payment of these funds, the incumbent Minister of Finance and Transfers, Besnik Bislimi, said this has come due to the fact that the data of companies and employees have been incorrectly uploaded to the system during the application to benefit from this package.
Bislimi points out that a number of workers received compensation on Friday last week, while the rest, according to him, will be paid today. According to him, some requests are delayed and will be addressed in the second part of the applications.
The incumbent Prime Minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti, said that in addition to the emergency package, which has already been approved and is worth about 180 million euros, there will be another package, which will be only for economic recovery, after pandemics.
"The incumbent government is planning the second package, that of economic recovery, which will be much larger than the emergency package and will have a much longer duration," Kurti said.
Kosovo's economy has consistently faced low levels of development.
2019 ended with an economic growth of 4.2 percent, which is estimated to have been insufficient in addressing the problem of unemployment faced by young people.
Unemployment in Kosovo is at around 30 percent and affects mainly young people.