Privatisation was brutally manipulated, especially in the times when the state property was guarded by Štefan Gavorník. He started to build his influence right after the establishment of independent Slovakia. Although not much was heard of him, he gained prestigious positions in the state structures right after the 1994 parliamentary elections, when the controversial party Združenie robotníkov Slovenska entered Mečiar’s government.
Shortly after the elections, the government decided that the privatisation of state property would be carried out through the National Property Fund. Although it might have seemed that removing the power to sell directly would limit the government’s ability to influence privatisation, the opposite was true. The National Property Fund, unlike the government, was not obliged to publish contracts, making it more difficult to access information about agreements with entrepreneurs and their terms.
Štefan Gavorník, who became president of the National Property Fund, repeatedly admitted in later interviews that the institution he headed made decisions solely on the basis of political orders from the government.
“We had the classic coalition councils on Monday and the privatisation councils on Wednesday. With iron regularity, they started at 6 p.m…. All of us who sat there lobbied for those who came to us,” Gavornik told Plus 7 Days in an interview.
According to Gavorník, the decisions on privatization were to be made mainly by Vladimír Mečiar, Ivan Gašparovič and former SNS chief Ján Slota. In the four-year period since 1994 alone, the National Property Fund sold off CZK 109 billion worth of property. In today’s crowns, the value would be an order of magnitude higher. The sale price of the companies was on average one-third of their real value.
Štefan Gavorník was responsible for several major privatization cases in which he was charged with several crimes. In interviews, he repeatedly suggested that commissions from the privatisations of Nafta Gbely or Východoslovenské železárny were collected directly by Ivan Gašparovič or Vladimír Mečiar.
However, Gavornik himself certainly came into his own. He is not giving up the fight for money even today. Paradoxically, however, he is on the other side, fighting against the state. This is a case in which the employees of Ružomberok paper mills are demanding payment of their share from the previous privatisation. The Ružomberský papier civic association claims that the SCP employees are entitled to 15 percent of the shares in the company Eco-Invest, privatised by Milan Filo. The activists made the serious accusation of privatisation fraud on the basis of a privatisation contract, the original of which they obtained years later.
However, Eco-Invest defends itself by claiming that the former employees are represented by lawyers around Štefan Gavorník, who prepared the privatization agreement on behalf of the state. In the event of a successful recovery of the money from the long-ago privatisation, he would receive a significant premium for his efforts.
