Solymos Criticises Halt of Vrakuna Remediation, Taraba Announces Solution

Bratislava, 29 April (TASR) - Ex-environment minister Laszlo Solymos and chairman of the extra-parliamentary Most-Hid 2023 party criticises the halt of the remediation of a former landfill belonging to a chemical works in the Bratislava borough of Vrakuna, being concerned about the threat to the waters of the Great Rye Island. Incumbent head of the ministry Tomas Taraba (a Slovak National Party/SNS nominee) told his predecessor that his aim isn't to spend money, but to achieve a positive result and announced that a solution will be presented within two months. "Just as I didn't understand [ex-environment minister] Jan Budaj, I don't understand the current minister either. They both inherited a real project on the table and threw it in the trash. They both promised the public a miraculous permanent solution to the environmental burden. In the case of Jan Budaj, time and prepared EU funds were wasted. The same will happen with Tomas Taraba," said Solymos. He also considers the scrapping of the entire remediation to be pointless, because he believes that it would require minimal energy to complete the project from the ministry's side. It should have been financed via EU funds. According to Taraba, it was a botched project from the beginning. "Our predecessors left us with unsettled land, a dubious contractual amendment with price increases, which is an assumption for the risk of a significant reduction of financial resources in drawing the EU funds. Currently, we're also preparing documents for investigative authorities, which are already dealing with Vrakuna in detail," he told TASR, claiming that the technical solution for Vrakuna has been defined as temporary. The Vrakuna landfill contains roughly 120,000 cubic metres of waste from chemical plants that was dumped there from the 1960s to the 1980s. am/mcs