President: State Must Find Way to Replace Transaction Tax in Future

(JOJ 24,'Politika 24', 1 June) The tax on financial transactions has a large number of technical shortcomings and if MPs improve it, I'm ready to support such changes, President Peter Pellegrini said on JOJ 24's discussion programme 'Politika 24' (Politics 24) on Sunday, adding that he believes that the state must find a way to replace the transaction tax completely in the budget in the future. "Yes, I respect that the government has chosen a transaction tax. I've taken a purely pragmatic approach to it. I had major reservations about it as president, I just signed it because I was told that without it, the budget couldn't be passed," he said, adding that as an economist, the tax doesn't make sense to him. For example, he doesn't understand why a company has to pay it even if it sends a salary to an employee, or why some hospitals have to pay it and others don't. "This tax has a huge amount of technical misunderstandings, incomprehensibilities. If they improve it, so be it, I'm ready to support any qualitative change. But for the future, I think the state has to find some other way to replace this transaction tax," stressed Pellegrini, pointing out that it has been in place for a long time in only two countries in the world. "If it was a good tool, I guarantee you that other governments would use it in consolidation," he stated. am