SaS: Energy Aid System Chaotic, Heating Prices to Hit Households Hardest (2)

Bratislava, 9 January (TASR) - Chaos persists in the new state energy aid system, and people are unable to resolve related problems, with the biggest difficulty concerning higher heating prices, opposition representatives from Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) warned on Friday. Households will first have to pay the full increased bills and then hope to receive an energy cheque from the state to compensate for part of the costs. "All that has emerged here resembles a vicious circle. If you have a problem with energy aid, you call the hotline and they send you to a client centre. At the client centre you are given a form to take to the Economy Ministry, but as the ministry is still non-functional after a hacker attack, nothing can be handled at the client centre and your energy aid problem remains. The circle closes and you have to start all over again," said SaS MP Karol Galek. Galek expects the most dramatic impact on people in the case of heating prices. While electricity and gas prices will be adjusted for state aid directly in bills, this won't apply to heating, and people will pay the full increased price. Only afterwards should they receive assistance in the form of an energy cheque. The opposition MP pointed to very different, and in some cases dramatic, price increases when comparing various Slovak towns and cities. In some places prices will rise by about one third, in Bratislava the increase is 64 percent, while in Kezmarok (Presov region) it's as much as 163 percent. According to Galek, more people than the originally announced 10 percent will fall through the cracks of the energy aid system. The reason is the error rate of the entire system. "The databases are incorrectly matched. We warned the minister from the start that it wouldn't be possible to match 400 databases. It turns out that we were right and the minister is now relying on it somehow settling down on its own. And when people seek energy aid, they'll come to a client centre and may indeed fail because the system won't work," he added. According to SaS, responsibility for these problems lies with the "invisible" Economy Minister Denisa Sakova (Voice-SD), who failed to prepare a functioning system of targeted energy aid over two years. The opposition party therefore called on Prime Minister Robert Fico (Smer-SD) to assign political responsibility and dismiss the minister. The Economy Ministry responded by pointing out that the ministry had recently been run by the SaS party, which hadn't even attempted to create a targeted energy assistance system, even though it had always loudly demanded such targeting. "Instead of solutions, they left behind a broken system in which the state resigned from real regulation and allowed energy suppliers to charge the maximum possible prices. The symbol of SaS's 'expertise' has become more bars drunk dry in Dubai than functional energy measures," the ministry said in a statement provided to TASR by its spokeswoman Maria Pavlusik. Although SaS currently presents itself as the protector of households, the fact is, according to the Economy Ministry, that it was during their term in office that a fundamental systemic failure occurred. "Thanks to decisions made during the SaS government, approximately 55,000 business entities were able to reclassify their consumption points as household tariffs and thus unjustifiably draw compensation intended for ordinary people. This problem must now be addressed by the current government to ensure that aid is fair, targeted, and sustainable," emphasised the ministry. The spokeswoman added that although the SaS party repeatedly talks about "chaos", it fails to mention that this is a consequence of its own decisions and failures to address issues which the Economy Ministry inherited. "Instead of a factual discussion, SaS offers only political shortcuts and false claims. Unlike SaS, the current leadership of the Economy Ministry is working to ensure that energy aid is targeted, fair, and protects households rather than speculators," added the ministry. NOTE: This story has been extended with Economy Ministry's response in the final three paragraphs. mf/df/am