NEWS
Prime Minister's press conference following the Government's 101st regular session
At today’s session, the Government of the Republic of Slovenia, alongside several other resolutions, adopted a draft Act amending the Excise Duty Act. At the press conference, the Minister responsible for this field, Franc Križanič, as well as Ministers Gregor Golobič, Irma Pavlinič Krebs and Darja Radić, and the Slovenian Prime Minister Borut Pahor outlined the major resolutions adopted by the Slovenian Government and then answered some topical questions.
At today’s session, the Government adopted a draft Act amending the Excise Duty Act. The proposed Act lays down excise duty on electricity in the amount of EUR 3.05 per one megawatt hour and excise duty on natural gas in the amount of EUR 0.0180 per one cubic metre of gas. The amended Act thus provides a legal framework defining excise duty amounts that apply as of 1 August 2010 and were laid down by a Government regulation pursuant to Article 66(1) of the Excise Duty Act, which confers on the Government the right to reduce the prescribed excise duty amounts by 50%. Moreover, certain editorial corrections to particular articles have been proposed in order to remove deficiencies and errors in the wording of the Act (due to the renumbering of articles in previous amendments).
Due to adverse macro-economic and public finance conditions and several, but unsuccessful attempts to reach an agreement with the majority of the representative public sector trade unions on the postponement of the phased payment of the third and fourth quarters of the amount regarding the elimination of basic wage disparities, the Slovenian Government adopted at today's session a decision on the termination of the public sector collective agreement and sectoral and professional service collective agreements and/or annexes thereto. The Government will shortly invite the representative trade unions to sign new collective agreements, whereby the dynamics of the elimination of the third and fourth quarters of basic wage disparities in the public sector will be subject to a 3% economic growth. Other provisions of the currently applicable collective agreements governing the classification of posts and titles into wage grades will remain unaltered, thus providing for the maintenance of the current basic wage level.
At today’s session, the Slovenian Government took note of and agreed the measure of the Ministry of the Economy to mitigate the consequences of damage caused to the Slovenian economy by recent floods and to allocate to the Slovene Enterprise Fund EUR 5,632,130.00 for the implementation of the measure under the previous resolution. According to the data obtained by the Ministry of the Economy by 28 September, the overall framework damage caused to the Slovenian economy amounts to EUR 50,000,000.00. The purpose of the measure "Promotion of the development of companies and individual sole traders who suffered damage as the result of natural disasters" is to provide immediate or rapid aid to companies and individual sole traders affected by these disasters in order to facilitate an early elimination of the impact of natural disasters and re-establish their normal functioning and activities. A public call is expected to be published on 8 October 2010. Pursuant to the Elimination of Consequences of Natural Disasters Act, the Ministry of the Economy will also prepare a Programme to eliminate the consequences of damage in the corporate sector, which will also include the measure outlined above.