A majority of members of the parliamentary committee for agriculture on December 9 rejected a proposal to hold a MPs’ inspection at the environment ministry, the TASR newswire wrote.
Pavol Frešo from the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKÚ) proposed the inspection and wanted to examine the supplementary payment of €15 million for emission quotas and the state of negotiations regarding the cancellation of the contract with the Interblue Group, which bought the quotas in 2008.
Frešo told TASR that there is not enough information on the matter and the report that will be presented to parliament by Environment Minister Jozef Medveď (Smer) will not shed any more light on the subject. He said that the report lacks the part of the correspondence between the ministry and Interblue Group that states that the company would not make a supplementary payment that was supposed to be provided if the original payment of €75 million was used on green projects.
The governing coalition members of the committee rejected the proposal. Magda Košutová (Smer) said that an inspection would be premature and that Medveď should be given the chance to present his report first and that some more time should be granted to him to resolve the whole issue.
Slovakia sold 15 million tonnes of emission quotas to the Interblue Group for €75 million, at a rate of €5.05 per tonne. According to the opposition, media and the present ministry management, this sum was disadvantageous. An extra euro per tonne was supposed to be paid by the company if Slovakia used the proceeds for green projects. Interblue manager Jana Lutken said on December 2 that the projects are not well defined and that the company will not pay the additional €15 million.
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
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