Slovak News Back to the news
Zitnanska: High Salary Bonuses for Former Ministry Officials Immoral
Tuesday 27 July 2010 Zoom in | Print page
Bratislava, July 27 (TASR) - Justice Minister Lucia Zitnanska said at a briefing on Tuesday that high bonuses for some of the former officials working at the Justice Ministry were okayed immorally.
According to her, a group of the privileged emerged at the ministry over the past years. "We're looking into it, and changes need to be made in this for the future. The new management at the ministry plans to enjoy no such bonuses. Not at all," emphasised Zitnanska, adding that she personally was staggered to see the list of excessively high bonuses approved over the past six months, in particular.
Her predecessors in the ministerial chairs between 2006 and 2010, Stefan Harabin and Viera Petrikova (both LS-HZDS), are reported to have remunerated their state secretaries Daniel Hudak (SNS) and Anna Vittekova (Smer-SD) salary bonuses so high that they earned more than then-premier Robert Fico, with each of them earning more than €160,000 on bonuses alone, over the past four years.
SME daily calculated that this must have ranked them among the best paid state officials in Fico's Government - while Fico earned around €43,000 annually, Hudak and Vittekova saw around €16,000 more on their paychecks every year, with annual bonuses from Harabin ranging from €9,000 to €31,000, and receiving the highest remuneration, climbing up to €62,693, from Petrikova this year in May - that is, shortly before the June election.
Former minister Harabin said the bonuses were fair, adding that the then-Opposition was regularly monitoring this while screening property disclosures.
All rights reserved. Any publishing or further dissemination of press releases and photographs from TASR's resources without TASR's prior written approval constitutes a violation of the Copyrights Act.
