ZAGREB, August 28, 2018 – The Uljanik management chairman Gianni Rossanda on Monday evening said in a statement to Hina that he was going to offer his resignation on Tuesday morning.
Rossanda says he does not wish to block “this complex system” and that he is ready to step down as soon as a new supervisory board and a new management board of this ailing ship building and repair group is elected.
He confirmed that through the offering of the Uljanik Group management chairman’s resignation, all management boards of the companies within the Uljanik Group had automatically also offered their resignation to the Uljanik Supervisory Board.
The government is looking for a solution which will be legal, sustainable and useful for the workers of the Uljanik shipbuilding group, Prime Minister Andrej Plenković said on Monday. “We will thoroughly explain to Uljanik workers, and ultimately to County of Istria and Town of Pula, the current state of affairs in Croatia’s shipbuilding and which way to move on, as this industry evidently has difficulty being self-sustaining. That’s why we are looking for a solution which will be legal, sustainable and useful for workers,” he told Nova TV.
Asked about Economy Minister Darko Horvat’s statement that the government is trying to find a way, together with commercial banks, to secure a loan to pay two wages to Uljanik Group workers, given that the government can no longer help shipyards, either directly or indirectly, Plenković said the government was trying to find a solution and help to overcome the problem.
He said that in that sense he had met with unionists and workers today and with the group’s management and a strategic partner last week. He noted that in January the government adopted a 716 million kuna rescue aid plan, in line with Croatian regulations and EU state aid rules, that facilitated the group’s functioning until today.
Plenković noted that taxpayers had helped one of Croatia’s strategic industries with over 31 billion kuna over the past 28 years.
He said the company, “whose management, including the supervisory board, completely without state influence, has brought business into the situation of today, which has chosen the strategic partner alone, which has prepared, together with consultants, a certain restructuring plan which has been informally forwarded to the European Commission,” was responsible for the assessment of said plan.
