The State Audit Office notes that after the liquidation of the Land Reform Committee no central organ has been appointed to determine the risks of land reform or endure that they are avoided. There was no supervision over the size of land owned by the persons participating in the privatisation.
By the beginning of the current year over 800,000 hectares of land had been privatised using various methods; and owners are yet to be found for approximately 200,000 hectares of land. The submission of applications for land privatisation has mostly been completed but many applications are awaiting the resolutions of land readjustment specialists.
The privatisers were mostly interested in forest land. However, the current privatisation procedure allowed profiteering from land sales transactions, because the closed auctions allowed one person to buy up to 200 hectares of forest land. This way, the lumber and wood processing companies assumed the place of entitled persons early in the privatisation process and took advantage of favourable conditions for the payment of the instalments.
The Audit Manager Maidu Lääne notes that the government did not create the necessary conditions for the inflow of appropriate amounts of money from the process of the privatisation. “The cost of the forest was determined according to the database that was dated, sometimes by as many as twenty years. This was why the assessed cost of the forest was lower than its real value and the average price of privatised land was set lower than it could have been.” Mr. Lääne added that the amount that the proceeds not received by the state were no longer determinable. This would mean that the actual value of all privatised land would be assessed at the moment of its privatisation, which is impossible after the properties have been privatised. The organisers should have done it in the course of privatisation.
According the SAO, the information concerning the unclaimed agricultural and forest land contained in the files of the privatisers is insufficient, which means that it is impossible to guarantee that all the privatisation decisions were lawful and all the instalments and interests were correctly determined.
In his response to the SAO, the Minister of Environment noted that if the organisers of privatisation had abided by the established rules and the spirit of legislation, there would be no reason now to discuss the numerous abuses.
Because the privatisation of land via all the methods has ended or is about to end, the taking of necessary remedy measures is no longer possible at the legislative stage. The Ministry intends to submit the draft of the Land Reform Act Amendment Act to the Parliament, the provisions of which would focus on the finishing of the land reform.
The audit report with the appended responses from the Minister and county governors is available on this website.
