EU FOREIGN affairs ministers officially approved help for the Tatra mountains from the European Solidarity fund amounting to €5.7 million, Slovakia's Foreign Affairs Minister Eduard Kukan told journalists on July 18.
The final approval is to be given by the European Parliament in September.
"There is only the last step, namely the official approval ... expected to take place in September, which means that in October we can count on receiving approximately Sk220 million (€5.6 million)," Kukan said.
Slovakia asked for help in alleviating the damage from November's storm as early as January 2005, and the European Commission proposed the exact sum in early June. However, the process of approval was delayed, since the European Council and the European Parliament could not agree on where the allocated money would come from, the TASR news agency wrote.
