ZAGREB, May 15, 2018 – The chairman of the parliamentary National Council for Monitoring Anti-Corruption Strategy Implementation Željko Jovanović on Tuesday sent a letter to Chief State Prosecutor Dražen Jelenić asking what steps had been taken regarding alleged irregularities in the purchase of Deutsche Telekom bonds worth 125 million euro by Croatia’s Hrvatski Telekom (HT) in December 2016.
Based on a petition by Zagreb entrepreneur Hrvoje Šimić to the parliamentary Petitions and Appeals Committee, Deputy Speaker Siniša Hajdaš Dončić too called on the Committee to discuss the alleged irregularities in HT.
“Seeing that Mr Šimić has expressed doubt that no action is being taken in that case and that the state budget was significantly defrauded, please explain what has been done in this case,” Jovanović said in a letter to the Chief State Prosecutor.
In his petition Šimić claims that, based on data on the Luxembourg stock exchange, it appears that HT didn’t purchase bonds from Deutsche Telekom AG but that the issuer in fact was Deutsche Telekom International Finance B.V. registered in Maastricht, the Netherlands. He underscored that Deutsche Telekom International Finance B.V. was founded with the minimum amount of capital required, that it is overindebted and that only HT bought an entire series of these bonds. Šimić noted that the media too described the bonds as being very liquid, but that from December 2016 until March 2018 they turned over zero euros. Šimić suspects that this is a case of syphoning money, defrauding the state budget and failing to observe the equality of all shareholders, including pension funds, veterans and more than 170,000 shareholders – Croatian citizens.
“The state budget was additionally defrauded because, by concealing the investment in these bonds, profit tax was avoided for the purpose of financing at privileged interest rates because that overindebted company Deutsche Telekom International Finance B.V is paying other lenders an interest rate of 4.7% which resulted in damage to the budget in the amount of about 9 million kuna annually or 30 million kuna in total,” Šimić noted in his petition.
Last year Šimić brought criminal charges against HT, its CEO Davor Tomašković and former board member Josef Jakob Matthias Thurriegl to the Municipal Prosecutor’s Office for abuse of the capital market, which was later dismissed.
The petition was dismissed on the grounds that HT is the daughter company owned mostly by Deutsche Telekom AG and that Deutsche Telekom International Finance B.V. was authorised to issue bonds on behalf of Deutsche Telekom AG on the Luxembourg stock exchange.
It was concluded that, based on the investigations conducted, there were no grounds to suspect that Tomašković and Thurriegl had committed the alleged offences.
