Agrokor is not the only Croatian company in danger of collapse.
In the shadow of the events surrounding Agrokor, Croatia’s largest privately-owned company, crisis has hit another major Croatian business – the construction giant Vijadukt. Company’s bank account has been frozen since last week, employees have not received salaries for two months, and the third should be paid soon as well, reports Večernji List on April 9, 2017.
Many workers are therefore leaving the company. According to trade unions, several dozens of workers a day have been leaving in the last ten days. Since the beginning of the year, more than 400 employees have left. At the end of last year, there was a total of 1,700 employees. The company received a strong blow earlier this month due to the termination of the contract for the construction of the Čiovo bridge. Due to the crisis, the chairman and a member of board of directors have been fired.
In 2016, Vijadukt had revenues in the amount of 806 million kuna, which was 40 million more than in 2015, while the profits were about 700,000 kuna. However, despite positive business results and active contracts worth around a billion kuna, Vijadukt became insolvent.
Former CEO Joško Mikulić tried to explain why the company ran into difficulties. He said that public clients have not paid them works performed in the amount of 147 million kuna. Another problem are companies with only one employee that may apply to public tenders and win them, since licenses have been discontinued. Vijadukt has also been hit by the war in Libya, where they had a contract worth 130 million euros. The damage due to the disruption of this work is estimated at 40 million euros and Vijadukt is negotiating with the Libyan government about compensation.
Krešimir Mikolić has been appointed as the new CEO. “We need to restructure, consolidate and continue to work in order to realize all the projects that we have agreed,” said Mikolić. One of these projects is the construction of the Svilaj bridge, worth 167 million kuna. Another projects are reconstruction of the road state road at Stupnik and the reconstruction of the Split Airport.
At this time, the problem are sites on which Vijadukt was performing works independently because there are no workers there. In joint projects, works are being taken over by its partners.
