By: Peter Jančič, Spletni časopis
The names of 136 meritorious individuals receiving high pension supplements, along with their heirs, had to be disclosed this week by the government and the Pension and Disability Insurance Institute of Slovenia (ZPIZ). Previously, the government, which grants these pension supplements, claimed it did not know who the recipients were, while ZPIZ, which has been awarding these supplements to heirs for over a decade, insisted that only the government could reveal the names of the fortunate beneficiaries. Somewhat surprisingly, in the dispute I initiated over these evasive responses, the Information Commissioner fully agreed with me. As a result, both ZPIZ and the government were forced to disclose all the names to the public. They had been hiding them. They are ashamed.
This was happening at the same time as GEN-I, after a dispute it initiated before the Constitutional Court to prevent people from knowing to whom large sums of money were being transferred for consulting, salaries, and similar expenses, launched a sharp attack on the Commission for the Prevention of Corruption (CPC). The reason? The upgraded Erar system revealed a €20 million payment to a private individual. GEN-I protested, stating that the transaction was actually a repayment of bonds to the Central Securities Clearing Corporation and not a payment to a private individual. However, the incorrect display of the transaction was not the fault of KPK or Erar. The incorrect data originated from the database of the Ministry of Finance, led by Klemen Boštjančič, and GEN-I itself bears considerable responsibility for ensuring its business transactions are properly labelled.
Others cannot know if the records are wrong.
GEN-I had previously failed in its attempt before the Constitutional Court to halt a legislative change enacted by Parliament, which would allow CPC to grant the public access to data on payments to private individuals, including the names of those receiving salaries exceeding the gross salary of the President of the Republic. These data are not yet available in Erar, and this likely caused great concern at the top of GEN-I.
As is widely known, GEN-I has been awarding astronomical bonuses, bypassing all the restrictions applicable to state-owned companies. Robert Golob certainly received such payments.
The Constitutional Court rejected GEN-I’s request for a temporary suspension of the new regulations, even though Parliament had not yet responded to the allegations. This was no coincidence – GEN-I has its allies in Parliament.
The Constitutional Court notified the National Assembly on January 8th that GEN-I had filed an appeal and requested a temporary suspension. Parliament had seven days to respond to the suspension request and 60 days to reply to the constitutionality review request. The Chair of the Justice Committee, Lena Grgurovič (Svoboda), urgently scheduled a committee session on January 16th to discuss the suspension but then immediately cancelled it.
Even without Parliament’s explanation of why it legislated the public’s right to know which private individuals received large payments from state-owned companies, the Constitutional Court rejected the temporary suspension request. This did not halt the Erar upgrade, which should have been completed long ago but still is not.
Tomorrow is also the deadline for Parliament to respond to GEN-I’s full request for a constitutional review of the right to information.
Grgurovič, from the party whose other name besides Svoboda (Freedom) is practically GEN-I, deserves public scrutiny for her actions. It appears she is aiding GEN-I in the Constitutional Court dispute by preventing the presentation of opposing arguments. After all, her party’s leader and several ruling MPs and politicians come from GEN-I.
Due to a request from the opposition SDS party, the entire Parliament will have to discuss this unusual situation in an extraordinary session – why the National Assembly has failed to respond to GEN-I’s allegations before the Constitutional Court.
I became particularly interested in the situation when GEN-I accused CPC of being responsible for the incorrect financial data, as I had recently pointed out that the Ministry of Finance’s database contained unusually astronomical salaries paid out by the state-rescued TEŠ (Šoštanj Thermal Power Plant) and the Municipality of Ljubljana. Access to this data is possible even without Erar.
It turned out that TEŠ and the municipality had entered transactions with incorrect purpose codes, leading to severance payments being misclassified as salaries. Like GEN-I now blaming CPC, TEŠ initially accused me of using data from a public database without verifying it with them first – without checking whether their accounting records had incorrectly recorded the transactions.
The positive outcome was that TEŠ eventually acknowledged the error and promised to correct it, admitting they had not even realised they had made a mistake.
However, the situation remains scandalous in the municipalities of Ljubljana and Maribor, where officials insist on keeping secret the gross salaries of their mayors. Allegedly, the total gross salary of a mayor is a private matter. This is an outrageous response from Zoran Janković and Saša Arsenovič.
How will they explain to voters before the next elections that they want another term while openly violating the law by concealing a basic piece of information – their publicly funded salaries? What is so secret or private about that?
If they are hiding even this, what else are they hiding? And why? Could fraud be involved? What else could be behind such blatant illegal conduct?
The upgraded Erar system of CPC also has serious shortcomings. It fails to follow the example set by Primož Bratanič, the creator of Supervizor (Erar’s predecessor), who made a significant effort to improve public access to complex data.
I immediately noticed that the new Erar no longer includes data on politicians who established private institutes – often used as conduits for party financing and campaign operations. For example, it no longer shows that the Institute May 1st was founded at the end of 2022 by then-SD president Tanja Fajon and general secretary Klemen Žibert. However, it does still record that Fajon later withdrew as a founder (owner), likely due to legal restrictions on a minister’s ability to conduct business with the government.
Similarly, information about Minister of Solidary Future Simon Maljevac (Levica) founding the private Institute March 8th for Nika Kovač as its director has vanished from Erar. The old Erar displayed this information, but the new version does not.
I asked CPC’s public relations representatives why these records about politicians founding private institutes had disappeared. They explained that it was an error they would correct. So far, they have not.
Perhaps because they have been too preoccupied with dealing with GEN-I’s attacks.
I hope they manage to fix this. People have the right to know who is behind these transactions and how state money is spent – especially when it involves ruling politicians or the state-owned GEN-I, the monopoly reseller of electricity from the state nuclear plant.
A dream state business. One that, under Robert Golob’s leadership, was privatised. Yet to this day, information about its dealings remains unavailable. No explanation has been given as to who decided to privatise state-owned GEN-I, who took ownership from the state, or what the financial consequences were for taxpayers.
The request for an extraordinary session on the public’s right to information about GEN-I’s business dealings states the following: object (34) Prenos.