After the Education ministry refused to publish the names of companies which succeeded in a suspicious call for EU-backed funding, the TREND business weekly created a list of probable winners on Sunday. As the magazine explains on its website, it received the data thanks to an applicant to the call, who had a password to the ITMS 2014 system, where the information about projects applying for funding can be found. TREND selected the subjects, which did not receive a rejection statement. According to the magazine, the list of 10 probable winners, was allegedly confirmed from two sources: one from the Education ministry and one from the government.
The Education Ministry was in charge of distributing €600 million in two calls. The first one for industrial research & development centres and the second one for long-term strategic research for €288 million. The first has already been closed, most of the agreements have been signed and the police is investigating corruption in some of the cases related to the project.
In the second one, no agreements have been signed. The government promised to cancel the entire call after the European Commission announced that it will cancel financing in four Euro fund calls due to suspicions in the calls. Aside from criticism from the opposition and media, even University rectors protested, as no public universities received any grants.
As the SME daily wrote citing analysts, this scandal led to the current coalition crisis which was triggered by chair of the Slovak National Party (SNS) Andrej Danko, who denounced the coalition agreement on August 7. The opposition is calling on Education Minister Peter Plavčan to step down and also on SNS to give up responsibility for the Education Ministry.
On Monday after meeting the partners from the Club 500 and representatives of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Education Minister Peter Plavčan said that they have agreed to change the evaluation system for choosing projects in the calls. The databases of the current evaluators will be cancelled and the new system should be built based on stricter rules. He also expressed worry that creating a new calls after the cancellation of the previous ones might lead to delays in projects.
