By: Peter Jančič (Spletni časopis)
“The analysis of salary data from the new payroll system is in its final stages. Data for January and February 2025 are expected to be published on Monday.”
On Friday, the Ministry of Public Administration gave me their third response explaining why, after the salary increases for the highest officials in the public sector at the start of the new year, the publication of data on the public salary portal – previously a resource allowing everyone access to information about the largest expense of the state budget – broke down. The system had worked for 15 years. It is not entirely clear why it failed during this “reform.”
Among the officials whose salaries increased the most with the new year are the mayors of Ljubljana, Zoran Janković, and Maribor, Saša Arsenović. Both are close to Robert Golob and the Freedom Movement. In February, both hid how much their salaries increased when I checked. They told me that the public has no right to know their gross earnings, claiming that would reveal their years of service. They could not be convinced that this claim was utterly ridiculous. For decades, no one has hidden gross salaries. From Janković, I was told: “Years of service are not public information. Other allowances are included in the base salary for calculation. The mayor’s base salary for calculation without years of service was 4,811 euros gross in December 2024 and 5,203 euros gross in January 2025.”
Similarly, people were kept in the dark regarding Arsenović. I responded to the concealment by warning them that this is foolish because the total gross salary of the mayor will be published on the public sector salary portal anyway, as it always has been in recent years. But no, it has not. The portal suddenly broke down. This data is still not available. Supposedly, it will be published next week.
The secrecy has been utterly unbelievable. All other institutions behave completely differently. I was also given gross salary data and the amount of the increase at the Supreme Court and Constitutional Court.
Do different laws apply to the highest judges than to Janković and Arsenović? Are Janković and Arsenović above the law? Apparently yes. The other side of this is that Slovenia is a banana republic. An unserious country. A lawless country.
Adam Šisernik from the public salaries sector first told me, when I inquired about what was happening: “Preliminary salary data for January 2025 are expected to be published by April 25th.”
Because it was not published, I repeated the question. The second answer was: “Unfortunately, due to new data submission systems in ISPAP, salary data for January 2025 are still being prepared and will be published probably in May.”
They were not published. It is already June.
Last week he told me it would be in the coming days.
We will see if this time they manage it.
All of this is a considerable disgrace. A country with a dedicated Ministry of Digitalisation is incapable of publishing public sector salary data that were taken for granted during previous governments. Whether the reason is the interests of Janković and Arsenović or something else, it is hard to say. There probably has to be some weightier reason for hiding the effects of the pay reform.
This is almost symbolic of Robert Golob’s governance. Even as director of the state electricity trader GEN-I, Golob started publishing only net salary and bonus data in annual reports when his earnings rose significantly – unlike everyone else who published gross figures.
These are the people elected to power, and this is what we have.
Government concealment of salary amounts and total expenditures on salaries should be a cause for serious public and media attention. Salaries are by far the biggest expense in the state budget.
Media with strong local journalists, like Večer in Maribor or Dnevnik in Ljubljana, remained silent or are still silent about the strange responses of mayors Janković and Arsenović about their salaries. As if they are used to being subordinate to power.
Used to the whip.
The unusually long downtime of the public sector salary portal did not disturb state media either.
Why?
Portals like the public sector salary portal, Erar, and similar sites allow everyone direct access to data about state operations, bypassing PR agents and other filters of power. Directly accessible data are key for journalistic verification and honest work. The fact that it does not work, and the biggest media are barely bothered shows there is little journalism and little effort for the public interest.
Everyone just wants money. Especially a lot from RTVS. Your money. The functions they should perform, they do not.
With some math, I already roughly showed in February what they hide from us in Ljubljana and Maribor and also presented comparisons. The prime minister earned a gross 6,791 euros in February. The leader of the largest opposition party, Janez Janša, earned 4,046 euros in the National Assembly. Janković earned 5,958 euros.
But that is just calculation and inference. We are interested in facts.
In terms of salary, Janković has surely climbed close to the Speaker of the National Assembly, Urška Klakočar Zupančič, and the head of government, Golob. And far above the MPs, including important ones.
He is simply Golob’s former boss. A capitalist, of course.
In recent months, we have also seen attacks on the Commission for the Prevention of Corruption (CPC), because it supposedly allowed people access to too much state data about payments to GEN-I and others. The information was allegedly incorrect. But these were government mistakes under Golob’s leadership, not CPC’s, which only summarised data.
It is apparently a huge problem that the data were inaccurate, which CPC was not responsible for. But the fact that the data are missing and hidden from people is not a problem for the authorities at all.
The accusations against CPC show there is probably an entirely different reason behind it. The authorities try to control what we learn. What you can and cannot find out is important.
We saw this also before the referendum on privileges for the cultural elite, when only after intervention from the Information Commissioner did the public learn who already receives those privileges under the existing system and in what amounts.
The data and facts completely shattered the government’s lies about how the Janša governments supposedly granted the most privileges. They granted around twenty in total, counting cultural and sports figures, far fewer than the three hundred or so granted under the current government.
Knowing and verifying facts is important. And we must fight for it.
And every time we must warn when someone tries to limit people’s rights.
Because that is where a banana republic begins.
