”Since Croatia has nationalised Agrokor, it is now a government debt” stated Sberbank’s Maksim Poletaev.
From the massive crisis that threatened to sink the entire Croatian economy that began this year, to the political crisis that followed it, to Ivica Todoric’s accusatory blog which grows ever more bizarre by the day, it would seem that although Agrokor appears to do very little other than cause aggro, the company name is one of the few things that are spot on.
As Poslovni Dnevnik reports on the 6th of October, 2017, back in August, Russia’s Sberbank filed criminal charges against Agrokor’s majority owner and ex boss, Ivica Todoric, as well as against the Agrokor Administration. This move was made in the hope of ”bringing the auditor firm who verified false reporting to responsibility”.
Sberbank’s Deputy Chairman Maksim Poletaev said in an interview with Interfax that Agrokor’s debt to the Russian state bank is now a debt of the Croatian state, which Croatia as a state therefore has to settle.
“Since Croatia has nationalised Agrokor, it is now a government debt, Croatia should convert the debt into state bonds and pay us off,” Poletaev stated to the Russian news agency, according to Bloomberg.
Agrokor is obliged to pay Sberbank about 1.1 billion euros.
Recently, Russian Ambassador to Croatia, Anvar Azimov, voiced his hope that the Croatian government would step up and deal with the relationship between the huge Croatian company and its biggest lender, Russia’s Sberbank.
“We want this problem to be solved as it is in the interests of all sides, including Sberbank and VTB,” he noted.
