The State Attorney’s Office has hired a small auditing firm to help in the investigation.
In conducting an investigation in the Agrokor case, the State Attorney’s Office has hired a small auditing firm, whose experts have reviewed the group’s financial statements and devoted particular attention to the controversial accounting manipulations and transactions which had allowed Ivica Todorić to extract large amounts of money from Agrokor illegally. The critical incriminations against former Agrokor leadership are based on a report prepared by the Antares auditing firm, which found that the Agrokor’s financial statements had been forgeries since at least 2006, which has allowed Ivica Todorić to gain unlawful profits through the illegal payment of dividends, reports tportal.hr on October 23, 2017.
Antares is a small auditing firm with just seven employees and an annual turnover of 1.28 million kunas. The company was founded in 2011 by Ivana Matovina, an auditor with international experience. She built her career at KPMG Croatia, a subsidiary of one of the four largest auditors in the world.
Antares lists numerous financial institutions as its clients, including the Croatian National Bank (HNB), the Croatian Financial Services Supervisory Agency (HANFA), the Croatian Bank for Reconstruction and Development (HBOR), PBZ Bank and Raiffeisen Bank.
According to business data, the company pays all its obligation on time, its revenues range from 1 to 1.4 million kunas a year, and in the last two years, it had relatively high profits of between 400,000 and 500,000 kunas.
Until now, the company has not had any significant business dealings with the state authorities. There was just one payment from the state budget in 2016, in the amount of 15,000 kunas.
However, the most interesting piece of information is the unusually low average salary of employees in the firm, which amounts to just 3,409 kunas. In other words, auditors involved in one of the most complex and responsible jobs in the criminal investigation of Agrokor are being paid less than many workers of Konzum, Agrokor’s most financially unstable company, where the average salary is 4,030 kunas.
Translated from tportal.hr.
