At a press conference today, vice-chairman of opposition party SNS, Andrej Danko, put forward a proposal of the party to tax the lucrative telecommunications, energy and banking sectors as a way of helping plug the public finance deficit, instead of putting the burden on common citizens through tax and payroll levies.
Talking about the particulars of the proposal, Danko referred to a 3% tax on revenues for telecommunications companies, for instance, while noting that similar taxes in the range of 0.9%-6.3% are commonplace in Europe.
Danko admitted that the situation was more complicated when it came to taxing the banking sector, because there were different approaches to the issue. The other opposition party Smer-SD has been trying to push through the concept of a banking tax since last year.
Where the energy sector is concerned, Danko said that the SNS party saw less scope for the introduction of some new ideas there, because of the system put together by the European Commission, which should start to take effect from 2013.