ZAGREB, May 24, 2020 – Social Democratic Party (SDP) Davor Bernardic, who on Sunday visited Split as a stop of on his party’s campaign trail, said that the SDP agenda included the construction of retirement homes with about 10,000 accommodation units.
Bernardic said that the SDP planned the construction of new senior homes so that “pensioners, whose numbers are growing in Croatia from day to day, can have a dignified life in their senior age.”
He said that the SDP agenda includes also the construction of flats that can be rented by undergraduates, young families, young researchers, and others who cannot live in their home towns, and in this context he criticised the currently high rent prices of flats in Split and other cities.
Bernardic said that the whole agenda of this strongest Opposition party would soon be unveiled and that it would include plans for digitisation of the country, fight against corruption, the establishment of an office for suppression of tax fraud, which he called the USKOK for tax frauds, in reference to the current Office for Suppression of Corruption and Organised Crime (USKOK), the overhaul of the judiciary, and legislation on checking the origins of someone’s wealth.
During his stay in Split, Bernardic especially criticised the situation in the city’s senior home in Vukovarska Street where 18 of the residents died in recent weeks after the coronavirus made its way to that institution. He accused the ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) of the developments in that home and for the fact that no one had been brought to justice for that.
The SDP chief would not comment on anything to reporters about the HDZ response that when it came to ethics, Bernardic should be aware that he himself had been found by the Conflict of Interest Commission to violate the principle of transparent action. In late 2019, the Conflict of Interest Commission recently established that Bernardic violated the principle of transparent action when, in 2014, he accepted a scholarship from the Cotrugli Business School worth HRK 263,000 because he received the scholarship as a politician and not as an expert.
Asked by the press about those HDZ comments and whether he had paid back the “contentious (scholarship) grant”, he said that he did not want to comment any more “on the most corrupt government in the Croatian history”.
