The long-awaited audit report has been postponed for a week.
On Friday afternoon, after six months of waiting, it was expected that extraordinary management of Agrokor would publish an audit report for 2016, which was supposed to reveal the real financial situation of the company. Rumours were that the report might even bring about the prosecution of Agrokor’s owner Ivica Todorić. But, late on Thursday evening, it was announced that the report’s publication has been delayed for a week, reports Index.hr on September 29, 2017.
According to sources, there was a disagreement between the contracting authority, which is Agrokor’s extraordinary administration, appointed by the government after the adoption of the Lex Agrokor, the government itself, and Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC), an international auditing firm which carried out the audit.
Agrokor announced that “neither Agrokor nor PwC have yet completed a complex task of preparing and revising the group’s consolidated financial statements.” Since PwC is one of the most prominent auditing companies in the world, it is hard to believe that they did not complete their work in time, so it can be presumed that the decision to postpone the report was made by Agrokor’s extraordinary administration.
It is interesting that just a week before the expected publishing of Agrokor’s audit report, its formal owner Ivica Todorić started blogging on a daily basis, often even several times a day, criticising Deputy Prime Minister Martina Dalić, Agrokor’s commissioner Ante Ramljak, and the government. Todorić claims that he had agreed to the Lex Agrokor under pressure (although he has not yet provided any evidence for that claim).
It is interesting that Martina Dalić and Ante Ramljak did not want to respond specifically to Todorić’s charges, and even more interesting that the announcement about the postponement of audit report came almost immediately after Todorić’s perhaps most ferocious attack so far. In his most recent post, the owner of Agrokor claims that Deputy Prime Minister Martina Dalić threatened she would have him arrested and that Ante Ramljak threatened similarly a member of Agrokor’s board of directors, even before the Lex Agrokor was adopted. Todorić noted that “e-mails and text messages cannot be deleted,” alluding to the possibility that he might have proof that he was threatened.
On Friday, almost six months after he took over the company, Ante Ramljak was expected to publish the audited business report for Agrokor. There is serious suspicion that Todorić did not present the actual debt situation in earlier financial statements, that he inflated its value and embellished the company’s business results, misleading many of the creditors. Rating agencies suspected financial statements’ quality, while Russian bankers have accused Todorić of lying and hiding billions of dollars in debt. That is why commissioner Ramljak hired the Price Waterhouse Coopers auditing house to review the financial reports for the last two years.
According to Nacional weekly, the revision was expected to show that Todorić overestimated the company’s value by two billion euros. This was apparently used to “fix” the debt to assets ratio, with an unrealistic presentation of values of brand and goodwill. If such allegations are proved, Todorić could face indictment for being responsible for the largest fraud in the state’s history.
Translated from Index.hr.
