Parliament should deal with a resolution at next week's extraordinary session, demanding that National Bank of Slovakia take steps enabling the return of the country's investment gold from the U.K. to Slovakia. SMER-SD leader Robert Fico informed of the plan at Thursday's news conference. The reason for this step is the risk of the impending economic and financial crisis and also Brexit process which is dragging on. As he added, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Germany and Romania have already decided to withdraw their gold from England due to Brexit and Britain's behaviour in Brexit matters.
House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Katarina Csefalvayova (independent) declared on Thursday that Smer-SD chair Robert Fico had decided to score populist points even at the cost of offending allies and needlessly undermining Slovakia's Euro-Atlantic ties. "Sadly, lawmaker Fico apparently opted to embrace the path of insulting allies as well as everyone with common sense. Encouraged by successes in issues such as the [pre-election] moratorium [extension on opinion polls] and the Istanbul Convention, he's aware that he can unconditionally rely not only on [SNS chair] Andrej Danko, but also on the increasingly more willing and reliable fascists," stated Csefalvayova, adding that Parliament should not play Fico's game or serve his election campaign.
According to Fico, all investment gold is deposited in the Bank of England. "We are talking about 31.7 tons of gold with a value of some 1.3 billion euros," he said. According to him, the annual appreciation rate of this gold is only between 0.2% and 0.4%. "That's nothing, it has absolutely no meaning," Fico said. On Thursday, the SMER leader also stated that investment gold had been in Great Britain for a long time, based on the decision taken by the then Czechoslovak government, which, according to him, wanted to prevent fascists from seizing the gold. However, Fico admitted that the proposal to return Slovak gold from the UK contains several question marks, such as a complicated transfer. At the same time, it should be borne in mind that this gold can be part of various business transactions. "The National Bank of Slovakia will probably have to hold negotiations to terminate the agreements between Slovakia and Great Britain," said Fico.
