“All activities in Bosnia & Herzegovina in the past two months have had to do with the state of emergency caused by the crisis, as they will for the foreseeable future,“ says Dino Aganovic, Head of Legal and Compliance at Heta Asset Resolution in Sarajevo. Nonetheless, he says, as dangerous as the virus is, he believes in being cautious about the steps taken to address it. “I must admit that I’m a bit of a skeptic when it comes to complete shutdowns,“ he says. “The global economy is sliding into a recession that is bound to impact poorer societies in terrible ways. We need to be thinking about the future as well, not just the present.“
Aganovic notes that, although Bosnia & Herzegovina is relatively small, it is nonetheless “so complex a web of different jurisdictions and legislative frameworks, [and with] three and a half million people, living as parts of two entities, with over ten cantons.“ As a result, he says, “sometimes the different approaches to the outbreak yield ridiculous results – like one of the entities having a curfew and the other not, so if you want to go from point A to point B you sometimes have to go around some territories otherwise you’d get a fine!“ Of course, such differences also cause variations in PPE requirements and similar matters.