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Radicova: Social Enterprises in Slovakia Are Sad Experiment on People
Thursday 14 January 2010 Zoom in | Print page
Bratislava, January 14 (TASR) - According to the opposition SDKU-DS party, Slovakia is facing another fiasco of international dimensions due to the ill-managed running of the country's so-called social enterprises.
"Social enterprises in the way that they have been introduced in Slovakia represent a sad experiment on the unemployed, an example of the camouflage of a social state run by Premier Robert Fico," said SDKU vice-chair Iveta Radicova on Thursday, adding that this experiment will be at the expense of all tax-payers.
One of Slovakia's watchdog organisations, the Slovak Governance Institute (SGI), has noted that an inspection carried out by representatives of the European Commission (EC) at the Social Affairs Ministry in December found errors in two out of eight pilot social enterprises.
Radicova said that her party has been pointing out that this grand project is being run wrongly right from the outset, and warned that a huge amount of public money was going to be wasted on it. However, those in power haven't been listening to the voices of the Opposition; with the Cabinet instead insisting on its original intention and the approved proposal having "plenty of fatal errors", added Radicova. In her opinion, it's a paradox that Social Affairs Minister Viera Tomanova said on Monday that social enterprises are an important and well-grounded concept in Slovakia's social system, even though her ministry closed down one of the enterprises in December because the terms of the contract had been violated. The public weren't informed of this back then.
Tomanova isn't conceding any mistakes, although she admitted that "certain shortcomings" have been identified. "I know the initial auditors' opinions. They stated that no mistakes were found in the national projects," she said.
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