In August, Prime Minister Robert Golob (Freedom Movement – Gibanje Svoboda) spent €39,300 on flights on private jets rented by the state from the company Janez let. Another €34,500 was paid to the company Flycom. An additional €22,200 was paid by the Foreign Ministry led by Tanja Fajon (Social Democrats – SD) to Janez let for flights in August. In a single month, Golob spent more on renting jets from Janez Let than Janez Janša (Slovenian Democratic Party – Slovenska demokratska stranka, SDS) spent in the entire time he was in charge of the previous government, when the country also held the EU Presidency.
Janša’s cabinet did not rent any planes from Flycom in recent years. In 2020, Janša’s cabinet paid €15,200 to Janez Let – €14,000 in 2021 and €9,500 in March of 2022. After the change of power, the cost of Robert Golob’s cabinet renting the planes already rose quite a lot in the first year of his government – to €41,700. This year, especially in August, the costs went up even more rapidly. Much more than inflation. In August, Robert Golob’s cabinet paid €73,800 in total to two companies for aircraft rental, according to the Erar application for the portrayal of public money use.
In June, the newspaper Finance revealed that Prime Minister Golob has additional ambitions when it comes to aviation, and that he is looking for a manned business aircraft for himself. The government explained at the time that Slovenia’s jet, the Falcon, is often broken, that there are few regular flights from Ljubljana, and that the President of the Republic, Nataša Pirc Musar, and the Speaker of the National Assembly, Urška Klakočar Zupančič (Freedom Movement), have a priority over Golob when it comes to using the Falcon. The additional aircraft that the Prime Minister’s Office was interested in renting would not have to adhere to this advantage of the other branches of power, because the aircraft would be used only by Golob, we learned. Two companies applied for the tender: Janez let from Ljubljana and Flycom from Žirovnica. That is why I recently checked the payment transactions for these two companies separately using the Commission for the Prevention of Corruption’s Erar application.
The €33,000 trip by Minister Sanja Ajanovič Hovnik and her husband to the Sustainable Development Forum in the USA, revealed by Eugenija Carl on TV Slovenia the other day, is not very remarkable, given that Golob spent €73,800 on additional jet rentals for himself in August alone. Golob has so far not commented on the Minister’s visit to the USA. The Minister was accompanied by Mateja Mahkovec, Nika Benedik, Maja Dimitrovski and Simona Hočevar. According to TVS, her spouse paid for the trip himself.
The Prime Minister’s Cabinet intended to hire the additional aircraft as and when it would be needed, and the framework agreement was for two years, with up to €120,000 to be spent on flights during that period, we learned in June. But already in August, the transfers showed that the actual costs would probably have been much higher. Financial transactions to date show that a good part of the total sum for the two years was spent by Golob in August and early September. If he spends €73,800 each month, as he did in August, he will have spent the two-year sum by mid-September.
But it is not only the Prime Minister’s office that is looking to rent extra planes on the market – others are also renting extra planes all the time. At the beginning of the year, for example, the Ministry of the Interior paid more than ten thousand euros to the company Janez let for such a rental. Additional rentals of aircrafts by ministries have not been uncommon in the past. However, the total cost of government rentals skyrocketed in August compared to previous years due to Robert Golob’s decision to fly more as Prime Minister.
I asked the government yesterday for details of where all these extra jets were flown this year, who all flew in them, and how much each of the flights cost us – the taxpayers.
But even without the said data, the Erar application clearly shows the recent increase in the amount of money spent for renting aircrafts.
Peter Jančič, Spletni časopis
