Prague, May 9 (CTK) – The Czech cabinet should grant monthly contributions to dismissed miners from firms mining not only black coal but also brown coal, and it should raise the mining fees the firms pay to the state to cover these contributions, five environmental groups write in a press release yesterday.
“It is the government’s duty to increase the sums that the prosperous brown-coal mining firms pay to the state,” they write.
“The government should support the dismissed miners, but it also must be seeking financial means for the welfare benefits from the mining companies,” Friends of the Earth (Hnuti Duha) Czech head Jiri Kozelouh said.
Petr Globocnik, from the Koreny Litvinov association, said the mining firms should be a responsible partner of the region and the money for the remediation of the landscape should be received from them in advance.
Apart from the Friends of the Earth and Koreny Litvinov, the written statement was signed by Greenpeace, the We Are the Limits group and the Association for Sustainable Life.
The cabinet will discuss the contributions for dismissed miners at its regular meeting on Wednesday. According to the Industry Ministry, contributions should concern the black-coal mining company OKD, which was declared insolvent yesterday, and ten other firms, including brown-coal mining companies Severni energeticka and Czech Coal.
The environmental groups said the owners of Czech Coal and Severni energeticka sent billions of crowns to their firms abroad in four years, while the Czech state received 400 million crowns in mining fees from them in the same period, the NGOs said.
“The miners and the state get a mere fraction of the earned money, while the owners pay themselves high dividends,” said Jan Pinos, from Greenpeace.
The environmental damage due to the mining and burning of coal reaches tens of billions a year, the groups said.
The government wasted the opportunity to markedly raise the mining fees, which are 1.5 percent of the market price of coal, the NGOs said. The fees are to double but will not further increase in the next five years according to the plan, the NGOs added.
According to the activists, the state must invest into the regions burdened by coal mining and support new jobs in small businesses. In the long term, brown-coal mining is to be reduced and mining limits have been set.
The Czech state might spend up to three billion crowns on the contributions to miners. A dismissed miner might monthly receive 8000 crowns for up to two and a half years.
($1=23.534 crowns)
