The American Chamber of Commerce in Slovakia, known as AmCham, has voiced reservations towards the draft amendment to the law on investment aid. AmCham dislikes the requirement of growth in employment and production volume by 15 percent, new demands towards strategic service and technologic centres, and the restriction of repeatedly provided investment assistance. “In the recent period, expansion of firms is more frequent than the arrival of new investments and therefore it should become a priority. We consider several of the proposed legislative changes to be restricting for expanding companies,” reported AmCham.
According to the amendment to the law on investment aid that made it to its second reading in parliament last week an investor that will want to only keep existing jobs will not be successful when asking for state assistance if new rules are passed. Under them, the net increase in jobs cannot be lower than 15 percent of new jobs from the average for the last twelve months but it cannot be fewer than 40 staffers. Established investors demanding stimuli from the state will also have to expand their production by at least 15 percent compared with the average for the last three fiscal years. “We believe that it is a considerable increase that can be difficult to realise mainly for bigger companies. Slovakia loses not only expansions of firms but also technologically demanding investments that do not open jobs due to this measure,” comments AmCham. The Economy Ministry also wants to toughen conditions for the provision of state assistance to technological centres and centres of strategic services, saying that such investors have to improve the education structure of employees. Under the new rules, at least 70 percent of the staff in these technological centres will have to have university education. AmCham argues that the proposed radical increase of the share of employees with university education from the current 30 percent to 70 percent will be a substantial obstacle, and that stricter business conditions will not restart the interest of investors to build new technological centres but will have the opposite effect instead.
Gavin Shoebridge
