By: C. R.
Despite the fact that the amendment to the Radio-Television Slovenia Act will enter into force this month, following the referendum and the arbitrary decision of the State Election Commission (thus providing the current government with the legal possibility of replacing the entire management team of the national media outlet, Radio-Television Slovenia), signatures of RTV programme councillors are still being quietly collected for the immediate replacement of the Radio-Television Slovenia Director-General Andrej Grah Whatmough, reports the web portal Požareport. In addition, the person collecting these signatures is councillor Branimir (Brane) Piano, a former journalist of the Delo newspaper, and in the spirit of the so-called “depoliticisation,” according to Požareport’s sources, the programme councillors are “getting personal calls from the Freedom Movement (Gibanje Svoboda) MP Mojca Pašek Šetinc, asking them to replace Grah Whatmough immediately.”
“With this, the Freedom Movement party MP has even allegedly threatened some councillors, or promised them re-election to the Programme Council,” writes investigative journalist Bojan Požar, who notes that it is not yet known whether Mojca Pašek Šetinc and Brane Piano, who has already applied to be a programme councillor on the basis of a staffing arrangement within the Freedom movement party, will succeed in collecting at least fifteen (15) councillors’ votes out of the minimum twenty-nine (29) needed to replace the Director-General of the national media outlet.
Interestingly, though, the names of these councillors are very likely to be the same as the 11 signatories to the recent request for an extraordinary meeting of the Programme Council – namely, Branimir Piano, Grega Drnovšek, Geza Filo, Anuša Gaši, Alenka Gotar, Rok Hodej, Aleksander Hribar, Robert Pajek, Andrej Prebil, Alenka Sivka and Jelka Stergel.
As also mentioned by Požareports, the motives for trying to replace Grah Whatmough this time and threefold: “Personal, because it is a matter of many small personal vendettas against him – and we already know about the political ones, and practical, because it is a way of preventing him from submitting a request for a constitutional review of the amendment to the Radio-Television Slovenia Act to the Constitutional Court. If he were to no longer be the Director-General, then he would not have the necessary legal interest to do that, which is, of course, a prerequisite for initiating proceedings before the Constitutional Court.”