The co-governing Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) party's parliamentary caucus is calling on the party’s nominees who managed the Košice-based TEKO heating plant to cancel the exorbitant severance payments they are to receive, Jozef Kollár, the party’s head of caucus, told the TASR newswire on February 4.
"We're hereby expressing our outrage and disapproval of their remuneration for their short managerial tenures," he said, while urging TEKO's former heads, Ján Podhorský and Ivan Zich, to also give up their generous severance payments. Podhorský and Zich have received €100,000 and €90,000, respectively, in severance payments. The former headed TEKO for 40 days while Zich's tenure lasted four months. Speaking on February 3, SaS leader Richard Sulík called such severance payments “plain outrageous”.
The law may have been broken when €90,000 was paid as severance to Ivan Zich (a SaS nominee), said Finance Minister Ivan Mikloš on February 4.
"It's obvious that when somebody receives as much as €90,000 in severance payments after several weeks on the job, he was acting in contravention of the interests of shareholders," Mikloš said.
The minister noted that the Commercial Code makes it clear that members of boards in joint-stock companies are not allowed to prefer their own interests to those of other shareholders. Mikloš also said the exorbitant severance payments in TEKO were made based on contracts closed during the former government.
"The National Property Fund is ready to call on managers in the state companies to sign addendums to the contracts which would allow these excessive severance payments to be scrapped. If they won't do this it will lead to consequences in personnel policies," Mikloš warned.
Source: TASR
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
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