ČEZ investor and minority shareholder Michal Šnobr responds to the chairman of the National Budget Council, Mojmír Hampl, in a comment for e15. Hampl first criticized Šnobr for his fight against the windfall tax. He considers, for example, the statement that the government has no extraordinary expenses until this January and should not collect extraordinary revenues, as false statements from the mouths of “Snobrians”, as Hampl repeatedly refers to the group of critics around Snobr in his commentary. “If we were to take all the objectively reported and measured one-time extraordinary costs of the state for energy interventions, we would arrive at almost 145 billion crowns,” opposes Hampl, who is also a minority shareholder of ČEZ.
According to Hampl, the national and joint European windfall tax amounts to less than 60 billion crowns, so at least another 87 billion is missing to fill the deficit. “In addition, the people of Šnobrov purposefully forget to include expenses for the cost-saving tariff or the waiver of fees for renewable resources, which the state bore precisely and only because of the energy crisis,” writes Hampl.
Snobr, in turn, calls the chairman of the National Budget Council an “official” who “mainly wants to harm the minority shareholders of ČEZ, who are insatiably harmful to him.” According to Šnobr, the windfall tax should end in 2023 for many reasons, so it should no longer be applied this year. “But as it became clear from the attitude of the NRR and the Minister of Finance, the last-minute temptation to improve the state budget of 2024 with a relatively effortless and simple ‘foundry’ in every sense was and is too strong,” writes Šnobr.
Michal Šnobr, J&T|E15 Michaela Szkanderová
According to Šnobr, ČEZ and its minority shareholders have already paid enough to the state for December 2022 and the whole of 2023. “The setting of the windfall tax by the Czech government and the attempt to extend it until 2024 is not only a professional disgrace of ridiculous proportions, but at the same time it is also a huge risk for future budgets, as the risk of future court losses in the collection of this tax is growing and the interest on late payment can also be expensive until it cracks,” warns Šnobr.
