BRATISLAVA, September 2, (WEBNOVINY) – In the selection procedure for the new head of the Public Procurement Office (UVO), three candidates are left who will advocate their plans before Cabinet members. The Cabinet Office informed SITA that four of 26 registered candidates got a chance to be heard by the Cabinet, but one decided to withdraw from the competition. Among registered candidates who failed to make it to the second round is ex-head of the UVO, Bela Angyal.
In the second round, Michal Matas, Peter Kubovic and Zita Taborska will run for the post. Three experts were helping the Cabinet Office evaluate projects of all registered candidates: Deputy Chairwoman of the Antitrust Office Daniela Zemanovicova, the director of the Czech branch of the NGO Transparency International David Ondracka and Jan Pavel from the Prague-seated economics university VSE. Each expert evaluated projects independently with grades ranging from 1 to 5, and all projects were anonymous. The Cabinet Office invited candidates whose projects got at least a grade of 2 on average to the second round.
The UVO top post has been vacant since July 7, 2010, after opposition SMER-SD nominee Roman Sipos decided to quit earlier in April. Sipos made this decision after Prime Minister Iveta Radicova criticized the office’s functioning. Though the right to nominate a candidate to the UVO top position originally belonged to the SMER-SD, the prime minister did not like its candidate and asked party leader Robert Fico to offer her another. As Fico refused to do so, the coalition decided to organize a selection procedure to pick a suitable nominee. According to the law, parliament elects the UVO chairman at the Cabinet’s proposal. The Cabinet will propose its candidate to lawmakers after a public hearing of the candidates.
According to the Friday issue of PRAVDA daily, the watchdog of transparency of state tenders currently lacks about 30 experts after 15 controllers, 13 lawyers and several more experts quit the institution in April. The remaining, roughly 20 inspectors thus have to cope with an extreme workload. An anonymous source from the institution says that people are leaving to get higher salaries. Last year, the state administration announced 7,000 competitions, while the office checked 416 of them. The number of controls is surging on an annual basis; the annual increase is 83 percent.
SITA