The Slovak Land Fund (SPF) board will be able to carry out its duties even without representatives from the opposition parties based on legislation that was enacted by the Slovak Parliament on March 3, the TASR newswire reported.
The initiative, as proposed by Smer MP Magda Košútová, was included in an amendment to the Act on Land Ownership Rights, following opposition reluctance to bring forward its nominees due to reservations about the SPF’s activities.
The board, whose role is to supervise SPF's activities, is supposed to have 11 members in total. Six of these are nominated by the government and the other five by the parliamentary committee for agriculture - three coalition nominees, and two opposition ones. Parliament must approve all nominations before the board members are appointed. All the former board members were dismissed last year over scandals involving land transfers in the High Tatra mountains.
“The importance of fulfilling SPF’s legally-designated roles requires that its board, as the SPF's supreme body, be operational even if in Parliament there arises a situation... when some political parties don’t make use of their right to put forward their candidates for board members,” Košútová said in justifying the legislation.
Opposition parties said earlier, however, that they aren’t willing to nominate their candidates for SPF board members until the end of the current electoral term. “We’ve agreed that because those (members) who were nominated (last time) were misused for political purposes and for hushing up what happened in the Fund (the land-transfer scandals),” explained Gyula Bárdos, the parliamentary caucus leader of the Hungarian Coalition Party (SMK). 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.
