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Environmentalists Take Issue with Dispersal of State Fund Funds
Tuesday 11 May 2010 Zoom in | Print page
Bratislava, May 11 (TASR) - The state-run Environment Fund granted hundreds of thousands of euros in subsidies for another obscure organisation for environment-related activities after the Environment Minister Jozef Medved met with the Fund's president Roman Kovac earlier on Tuesday.
The Aktualne.sk internet portal said on its website that the civic association calling itself Eko-buducnost(Eco-Future), formed in December 2008, stands to receive €566,000 for the four projects relating to environmental education and to promotion and protection of the nature and country.
Eko-buducnost is criticised for not having released any info about itself, and for not having a website. But Kovac claims that there is no launch of a website among the subsidy-granting criteria. "The Environment Fund does not look into the history of an applicant, we set great store by the quality of projects. Similar organisations have been backed by the Fund in the past," he said.
Greenpeace, the best-known environmental organisation, highlights the amount of subsidies awarded in the past decade. The 75 projects (40 non-governmental organisations) included 49 projects getting up to €16,600; 10 projects €33,200; another seven got €66,400 and nine projects received more than that.
Juraj Rizman, head of Greenpeace in Slovakia, said no other organisation than Eko-future was awarded more than two subsidies in the span of a year.
Contentious allocations from the Environment Fund, whose board advises the Environment Minister on subsidies, had forced the first environment minister Jaroslav Izak from office in 2008 at the behest of Prime Minister Robert Fico, who said at the time that the drawing of funds was lawful but unethical.
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