ZAGREB, July 24, 2018 – The State Prosecutor’s Office (DORH) has not yet spent the five million kuna the government allocated it in May 2017 to cover expenses of the Agrokor investigation and most of it will be spent on the extensive audit, State Prosecutor Dražen Jelenić said on Tuesday.
The audit has not yet begun, he told reporters after the closing of a project for the strengthening of human resources in DORH and the USKOK anti-corruption office as part of the European Union’s IPA programme. The project was launched in February 2017 and cost 208,000 euro.
Jelenić’s answers to reporters indicate that an indictment in the case of the heavily indebted Agrokor food and retail conglomerate is still not in sight. Some witnesses still need to be questioned, some through international legal aid, including one in Great Britain in October, he said.
Asked if the state should have done more to improve the inefficient judiciary, Jelenić said DORH was not inefficient because it worked under strict deadlines and that it did not contribute to the inefficiency of the judiciary to the extent that it was perceived in public.
He said DORH wrapped up 2017 with a shortage of 150 prosecutors. He said 38 young deputies were sworn in last week but that in the meantime more than a dozen prosecutors had left DORH.
Jelenić said the knowledge base developed as part of the project would help DORH a lot in its work. He said USKOK was the only prosecuting authority still not using the Case Tracking System due to location problems.
He said he had discussed relocating USKOK with the justice minister. DORH is the most understaffed authority and we can’t have more people because we can’t accommodate them, he added.
