The Kosovo authorities expect to collect some 2.5 million euro this year from two border crossing points with Serbia which will be earmarked for the development of the north.
The head of Kosovo’s customs, Lulzim Rafuna, said that “so far some 130,000 or 140,000 euro have been collected” at the border crossing points into Serbia in Jarinje and Brjnak.
At a press conference on Sunday, he predicted 2.5 million euro would be taken by the end of 2014
Rafuna said that “the money flows into a special fund for [investment in] the north” which was established a month ago.
The deal to establish the fund was taken in January last year amid the EU-mediated dialogue on normalising relations between Kosovo and Serbia, when both sides reached a provisional understanding on the collection of customs duties, levies and VAT.
The fund for the north is being managed by a three-member board, consisting of Danijela Zubac, from the Serbian community in the north, Besim Beqaj, Kosovo’s finance minister, and the EU special representative in Kosovo, Samuel Zbogar.
The fund is not the first of its kind; the Kosovo government previously set up a fund for northern areas in 2010, to which it contributed 500,000 euro.
It later offered the northern municipalities another five million euro for capital projects.
But opposition hardliners in Pristina have criticised the new fund, with MPs from the Vetevendosje Movement warning that it would divide the country into “a developed north and a poor south”.
Since the end of the Kosovo conflict in the late 1990s, the north of Kosovo has been beyond the Pristina government’s control, while Serbia has continued to finance local security, judicial, health and educational institutions.
But the authorities in Pristina hope to integrate the area after municipal elections produced new local governments in the north.
http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/kosovo-expects-increase-of-custom-revenues-in-the-north
