Bankrupt Liberty Ostrava steelworks wants to close its coking plant and lay off 2,600 of its 5,000 workers. The unions are up in arms. Kovo labor leader Petr Slanina said recently on Czech TV that the unions notified the Czech government and EU Commission in 2018 that Sanjeev Gupta of Liberty wasn’t an appropriate investor. Dep. Regional Gov. Jiří Navrátil of KDU-ČSL said that he and most others thought this as well and that Gupta has been leading absolutely everybody on. Kovo labor leader Roman Ďurčo said that the EU Commission gave the green light to the sale despite being warned. In its latest edition, The Economist cited CEO Maxim Timchenko of DTEK, which runs most of Ukraine’s non-nuclear power plants, as saying that, “The irony of this destruction and this war is that it accelerated the decarbonization of the energy industry of Ukraine.” It’s the same with the EU Commission’s decision in 2019. Value is being destroyed in Ostrava, but Liberty Ostrava will be decarbonized.

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