By: C. R.
Požareport wrote that regardless of the fact that, following the referendum and the arbitrary decision of the State Election Commission, the amendment to the law on RTV Slovenia (and thereby giving the legal possibility to replace the entire management of RTV) will come into force this month, right now the signatures of RTV’s programme councillors are quietly being collected for the immediate replacement of the general director of RTV Andrej Grah Whatmough. At the same time, he adds that these signatures are being collected by Councillor Branimir (Brane) Piano, a former journalist of Delo, and according to his sources, programme councillors “are being personally called on by the member of the Gibanje Svoboda party, Mojca Pašek Šetinc, to immediately replace Grah Whatmough” in the spirit of the so-called “depoliticisation”.
“At the same time, the member of Svoboda even threatened some councillors or promised them re-election to the programme council,” wrote Bojan Požar, who noted that it is not yet known whether Mojca Pašek Šetinc and Brane Piano, whom already knowingly applied as a programme councillor on the basis of a personnel agreement within the Gibanje Svoboda, will manage to collect at least fifteen (15) councillor votes out of twenty-nine (29), which is the minimum required to replace the general director. It is interesting, however, that “the names of these councillors most likely match the eleven signatures under the recent request to convene 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 Požareport also wrote, the motives for this time’s replacement of Grah Whatmough are threefold: completely personal, political, and practical: “Personal because it involves many small personal revenges, political ones we know anyway, and practical because they want to make it impossible for him to submit a request in this way to review the constitutionality of the amendment to the Act on Broadcasting – to the Constitutional Court. As if to say, if he is no longer the general director, he cannot have the necessary legal interest, which is of course a condition for starting proceedings before the Constitutional Court.”