The business daily Finance calls in Monday's commentary on the government to do something about cartel agreements and better protect competition if it wants to make Slovenia a more business-friendly country.
Protection of competition is a much less ideological issue than, for example, raising of the minimum wage.
While Slovenians love to divide themselves to leftists and rightists regarding almost all important issues, all of them will probably agree that cartels are bad.
At the end of the day. all of us pay the price. No-one who tries to regulate this area is going to hear it from the voters, the paper says in "Let's Unmuzzle Krašek" in reference to the head of the Competition Protection Agency Andrej Krašek.
A comparison with Austria shows how hard it is for the Competition Protection Agency in Slovenia. While EUR 400m in fines was imposed in Austrian in the last four years, only EUR 2.3m in fines has been paid in Slovenia since 2007.
And why Slovenia should not regulate this field, wonders the paper. This is probably a tough task, and Slovenian politics has shown in the recent years to be very impotent when it comes to solving difficult tasks.
But someone will have to crack this tough nut, if we want to be a country attractive to businesses. After all, dear politicians, this is what are you paid to do, concludes the commentary.
Source: Slovenia Times
