If the Slovak Finance Ministry and Tax Directorate don't scrap the recently announced tender to find a new building for offices in Košice, the four MPs from the 'Ordinary People' faction headed by Igor Matovič (who currently sits as an independent) will no longer feel bound by the Coalition Agreement, Matovič told the TASR newswire on Tuesday, April 26.
The faction doesn't agree that a new tender for a rental agreement to remove suspicions of cronyism that the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKÚ) has been facing. Matovič thinks that the matter can be resolved only by completely scrapping the tender, which he views as useless.
A rental deal approved by Tax Directorate head Miroslav Mikulčík (an SDKÚ nominee) and granted to a company owned by SDKÚ regional head Ondrej Ščurka was cancelled last week. Mikulčík resigned from his post after a political crisis in which Prime Minister Iveta Radičová demanded that he step down despite Finance Minister Ivan Mikloš expressing confidence in him.
The four MPs cast doubt on how relevant the criteria are for the rental agreement and are demanding an analysis of the efficiency of uniting all the tax offices under one roof. A new transparent tender should then be announced that could be made available to smaller lessors as well. "The price for the rental of such premises [for individual tax offices not located in one large building] is much lower than the prices that were quasi-chosen in the tender," said Ordinary People.
Source: TASR
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
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