BANJA LUKA (Bosnia and Herzegovina), April 12 (SeeNews) – Bosnia’s Serb Republic is holding talks with three potential strategic partners for the construction of a power plant near the Miljevina coal mine in an attempt to restart the mine, local media reported.
The focus of the mine’s business plan is to find a strategic partner which would build a thermal power plant so that all coal that is mined at Miljevina could be used, news portal Fokus (www.fokus.ba) quoted the mine’s acting director Nenad Matovic as saying late on Sunday.
Miljevina’s main problem is finding markets for its coal. The mine has some 15,000 tonnes of coal in stock but nobody to sell them to, he said.
The coal mine is located in the Serb Republic, which together with the Muslim-Croat Federation makes up post-war Bosnia. The Serb Republic took it over for 5.0 million marka ($3.5 million/2.6 million euro) in a bankruptcy auction in late 2007, local media reported earlier. Since then, the mine has performed only maintenance operations.
Matovic said a restart of the mine would open 200 new jobs. Around 20 workers are employed in maintaining the mine’s infrastructure at present.
In September 2009, Bosnian media reported Hungarian investors and Russian businessman Oleg Burlakov were interested in the Miljevina mine.
(1 euro=1.95583 marka)