Environment Minister says €15 million isn’t lost, just not received

According to Environment Minister Jozef Medveď, Slovakia could not have lost €15 million from the sale of its carbon-dioxide emissions quotas it just has not actually gotten the money yet, the TASR newswire wrote.

According to Environment Minister Jozef Medveď, Slovakia could not have lost €15 million from the sale of its carbon-dioxide emissions quotas it just has not actually gotten the money yet, the TASR newswire wrote.

Medveď was reacting to media reports that the American Interblue Group, which bought Slovakia's carbon-dioxide emission quotas in 2008, will not pay an extra €15 million into the Slovak Environmental Fund's account. The first instalment of the additional payment, which was supposed to be payable because the environment ministry managed to include the government's heat-insulation programme in the Green Investment Scheme (GIS), was due to be sent to the government account on November 27 while the second part was expected to come on December 1.

"If we'd had the money in our account, then we would have lost it," said Medveď to TASR on December 2, claiming that the ministry is currently doing everything possible to obtain the money from the Interblue Group.

“According to the contract, we've taken all necessary steps to contact the trading partner and get the money. We approached them asking them to pay us according to the contract, one euro per tonne, €15 million for 15 million tonnes,” he said.

The information that Interblue Group would not pay the additional money was published in Hospodárske Noviny daily on December 2. The daily wrote that Interblue Group stated that it doesn't see any reason to pay because the documents that it received from the environment ministry aren't correct.

“The presented projects concerning the heat insulation programme are not exactly defined, their CO2 (carbon-dioxide) emissions savings aren't quantified and a unified quantification of the pricing method still hasn't been approved,” Interblue Group told the daily. TASR

Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
The Slovak Spectator cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information presented in its Flash News postings.

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