April the 5th, 2023 – Could former Agrokor boss Ivica Todoric now have the upper hand in an arbitration dispute across the pond in Washington? The man who was once plastered across the glossy pages of Forbes as Croatia’s richest has announced that he’s going to step back into politics.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Suzana Varosanec writes, Goran Jandrokovic, the Croatian Parliament speaker, asked if a journalist was ”seriously asking him that” when asked for his comments on Ivica Todoric’s latest plans to become politically active in time for the next elections.
Despite his uncertainty about the legitimacy of the question put to him, Jandrokovic simply stated: “we live in a democracy, anyone who has political ambitions can run for office”. Even parliament member Katarina Peovic, who is known for her controversial statements and stances, doesn’t consider Ivica Todoric’s political plans to be a topic of interest for her, as she considers him to be the “Monty Python of the political scene”. The former owner of Agrokor, however, has been plotting and is going to announce a political party of his own.
The formation of a new political party wasn’t the sole reason for the former gazda (boss) calling a press conference. As the main topic, he highlighted the way in which the Extraordinary Administration of Agrokor ”created the insolvency of the entire Agrokor Group and the financial and business situation of today’s Agrokor (Fortenova) in relation to Agrokor d.d.”. Yes, he’s still talking about it.
In short, Ivica Todoric believes that he was the victim of a conspiracy and a plan to take over Agrokor’s assets, which won’t come as any sort of new information to anyone who has followed the Agrokor fallout from back in 2017. He alleges that Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic and the Borg group are at the helm of said conspiracy, and, according to him, foreign services, Russian and American, also played a significant role in everything. Although for years before 2017 and the introduction of extraordinary management, Agrokor followed the epithet of a highly indebted company, he still claims that Agrokor was not in financial trouble, and he reiterated that the plan was to go to the London Stock Exchange.
“In order to achieve the goal of a hostile takeover of Agrokor and expropriation, the bankruptcy of the entire Agrokor Group, i.e. the key 40 companies, had to be ensured. Since no company within the Group was insolvent, it was impossible to implement bankruptcy proceedings. Therefore, a monstrous plan was constructed by which co-debtor guarantees of members of the Agrokor Group were booked into the expenses and liabilities of each of the companies, and that was done in full, in order to create a fictitious insolvency,” these are some of the highlights of Todoric’s claimed truth.
In this regard, he says that the co-debt guarantees issued by 16 members of the Group for Agrokor d.d. amounted to 14 billion kuna, which was “turned” into 224 billion kuna by the aforementioned accounting multiplication. He explained more, and stated that eventually, all of this debt was in his words ”artificially multiplied” to the enormous sum of 320 billion kuna.
The problem, however, is that even without this accounting multiplication, the guarantee would have sunk the operating companies entirely. Another question is whether the guarantees were approved in a legal way even before the Extraordinary Administration took over. In fact, Ivica Todoric is saying today that the debt of the former Agrokor was actually a so-called “junk debt” that was being written off. In other words, it follows that the guarantees shouldn’t actually have been accepted, but according to Todoric, the extraordinary administration didn’t refuse any of that because it was the only way to declare insolvency for Agrokor. The former owner of the massive domestic concern also believes that Agrokor’s debt stood at 35 billion kuna out of 50 billion kuna in turnover, adding that “today they have 30 billion kuna in turnover and 33.5 billion kuna in debt” and that “the company (being Fortenova) is withering”.
Admittedly, in his interpretation, it turns out that the aforementioned debt of Fortenova was practically newly created, although that is not exactly the case.
Even from the time the settlement was agreed due to the controversies that followed the entire process, it was clear that this insolvency procedure would have quite a few legal tails to it. And the fact that Ivica Todoric, who used to be much more inclined to one-way communication, has lately been making public appearances is more related to legal processes than anything else.
First of all, he was certainly encouraged by the DORH debacle in connection with the expert report in the case of the so-called of the ”great (veliki) Agrokor”, i.e. by the decision of the Indictment Panel of the County Court in Zagreb, which deemed Ismet Kamal’s financial expertise, on which the indictment for withdrawing 1.2 billion kuna was based, illegal evidence.
Will this prove to be an important trump card in the arbitration dispute that Todoric and his Dutch company initiated in Washington some two years ago? Perhaps. He seems to be counting on that, and claims that, in addition to the USA, he has the right to litigate in several European countries.
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