The house must go

The move is very quick. Only a smokestack, a silo and two black oil tanks remind people that a few months ago there was a sugar refinery employing 180 staff and processing an annual 300,000 tonnes of sugar beet. The rest is mere tonnes of debris. After the excavators have bitten at wires, cables and pipes hidden a metre underground, nothing will be left of the former sugar refinery near Hrochův Týnec in eastern Bohemia. The owner of the refinery, British-French group Eastern Sugar, will get a CZK 1 billion reward from Brussels for the demolition. Owing to the group, local people have an opportunity to watch something as attractive as „a reduction of sugar overproduction in the EU“ in practice – live. But they don't like it one bit.

Why so rough?

„This would make you cry,“ says Hrochův Týnec mayor Miroslav Besperát.„I've known the refinery for 40 years. It worked perfectly, like a Swiss watch,“ he adds, shaking his head in disbelief. Former staff feel the same. „They started to upgrade the plant at the beginning of the 1990s,“ says a man who has worked at the refinery for over 30 years. Just like his other colleagues, he wants to remain anonymous, „to be on the safe side“. „The new silo, the sugar packaging line – all this has cost dozens of millions. And now it will be gone?“ asks a man who lives in a block of…