The sale, conducted under the previous Janez Jansa government, is being pored over by the Court of Audit. Its President Igor Soltes told the STA on Thursday that the final report would be released early next year.

But Dnevnik cites unofficial information revealing that the audit has found the sale uneconomical and opaque, one of the reasons being that negotiations were conducted with only one bidder, Koks's Slovenian company Dilon, as a result of which it was impossible to attain the highest possible price.

What is more, the commission negotiating on the sale on behalf of the government, headed by Marija Zagozen (the wife of the then boss of power utility HSE and one of the suspects in the Patria case Joze Zagozen) excused Dilon from many of the initial commitments.

The auditors have also found flaws in the government's handling of the sale, such as adopting a different programme of the sale as determined in the valid decree and failing to notify parliament on time of the subject and method of sale.

One problem was that SIJ officials were involved in the sale process, including the selection of the valuer, Teseus. The appraisal did not include vital data on SIJ's solid performance in the first nine months of 2006, which could affect the final price.

The sale contract included a provision whereby the state renounced distributable profit, which at the end of 2006 added up to more than EUR 70m, or two-thirds of what the state got for the 55.35% stake in SIJ.

The final contract also did not include some of the commitments the buyer was supposed to agree to under the draft sale contract. The lax commitments prevented the government from penalising the buyer for non-compliance.

It comes as little surprise then that the buyer invested EUR 50m less in the Slovenian group than agreed and that it failed to honour commitments on the number of staff, the Court of Audit found according to Dnevnik.

Soltes told the STA that he could not comment on what was an ongoing procedure, explaining that the report would be released after the parties involved submitted their objections to the draft report and these were examined.

Andrej Vizjak, who served as the economy minister at the time of the sale, rebuffed the report and labelled its leak as an "election stunt", arguing that the sale of SIJ was "exceptionally transparent and economical".

He noted that three international firms submitted bids for SIJ, and that the selected bidder offered a price twice that of the second most favourable bidder, while also pledging to keep jobs and EUR 300m investment in development of SIJ by 2012.

"The allegation that the state could have got more is ludicrous as no one with a better offer responded to the tender," Vizjak stated, adding that it was "no coincidence that an unofficial document was leaked to the public just before the election".