Soitron Rejects Minister's Claim It Misled Interior Ministry Over Cameras

Bratislava, 12 August (TASR) - The supplier of traffic radar cameras, Soitron, did not mislead the Interior Ministry, Soitron Group executive director Ondrej Smolar told TASR on Wednesday. Smolar emphasised that the company worked with the information available to it at the time and does not shirk responsibility for its actions. Smolar said this in response to a press conference held by Interior Minister Matus Sutaj Estok (Voice-SD) earlier in the day, where Sutaj Estok said that the Interior Ministry had been misled by the company. According to Smolar, Soitron had never planned to supply the ministry with the cameras for full-scale operation; the use of two cameras during testing arose from the circumstances. "To mislead someone, we would have had to deliberately provide information other than what we had. We had no information other than what we provided to the ministry on an ongoing basis at its request, as well as within the project. That means we certainly did not lie; we worked with the information available to us and provided that information to the ministry," the director said. Smolar also noted that the cameras did not receive data from information systems during the testing phase. "The system is not designed that way, and it cannot be implemented that way," he said, adding that the cameras only captured data, pre-processed it and sent it to the transaction module. He defended the company's work, explaining that Soitron worked only on the software solution and that supplying the cameras to the ministry had not been planned. However, it used the two aforementioned radar cameras to test its work. "The transaction module that we programmed was developed using all the security standards known at this point. We are convinced that it has been programmed correctly and poses no security risks. We will be very pleased if an external audit confirms this," he said. mf