As the water only gets hotter for the deputy prime minister, it seems Martina Dalić isn’t in any particular rush to step down.
Once upon a time, Ivica Todorić, the self-proclaimed citizen in England, wrote about strange emails from Martina Dalić in his earlier blog posts. Everyone laughed it off as yet another of the former Agrokor boss’ attempts to free himself of the chains of tremendous blame and guilt for the would-have-been economic disaster known as the Agrokor crisis, a bombshell that rocked the country and almost dragged the domestic economy to its knees.
Have Todorić’s claims, written from the comfort of his London home, been dismissed too quickly? Possibly. Does it mean that all the apparently not so wild statements he has so firmly clung to in regard to Martina Dalić’s heavy involvement in Agrokor and the penning of Lex Agrokor are true? No. What is true, however, is that suspicions, both public and private, surrounding the deputy prime minister’s obvious desire to bypass talking about the authors of Lex Agrokor at any cost, weren’t without reason.
Index was the first to publish emails from Martina Dalić sent via Hotmail, of all servers, which well and truly immersed the deputy PM in uncomfortably hot water. With the humiliating echoes of the calls from all sides of the political spectrum for her dismissal, for her to step down, and for Andrej Plenković to step down with her because he ”obviously knew everything that was going on too,”, you’d think Dalić would simply step down quietly amid the chaos and disappear into the political fog, only to emerge again in several years, as is usually the case. It would seem, however, that it’s chaos she wants, despite her claims that the attacks on her are what will see Croatia pushed into political chaos.
Since the ”outbreak” of information provided by Index, Dalić has faced onslaught from all angles, despite continually claiming to have not engaged in any illicit behaviour. Despite calls from coalition partners to have Dalić removed from her position, Plenković has stated that she has his support, and one is left wondering just how much more dirty the Agrokor situation can become as Dalić is set to be investigated by the Conflict of Interest Commission, yet retaining her ministerial position, firmly at Plenković’s side within the government.
In spite of the proverbial whirlwind circulating around her and all but consuming her with it, Dalić is sticking to her unwavering position of having done nothing wrong, even going as far as to state that she has no intention of stepping down, nor does she understand why people think she’s lost the confidence of HDZ’s clearly furious coalition partners. It seems whoever enters the whole Agrokor affair gets transported into another mental dimension.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 11th of May, 2018, Martina Dalić has commented on the latest events surrounding her eyebrow-raising Agrokor emails. She repeated what she said to the Economy Committee from February this year, that there was no relationship of any kind or at any time between herself and Šavorić. Prime Minister Plenković also found the time to comment on the latest events on this topic on Friday ahead of what was surely a rather uncomfortable ruling coalition meeting which was scheduled for 11:00.
“I’ve got no connection with Šavorić, I met him in the context of what I’ve spoken about, that independent experts are engaged in the analysis of solutions,” claimed a burdened Dalić.
In response to a journalist’s question insinuating that there was close cooperation between the two, Dalić said that ”being with someone doesn’t say anything about a relationship”
“I have email correspondence with many people daily, and in the context of this problem, I’ve got correspondence consisting of thousands of mails, I keep that within four email addresses,” Dalić said, as was reported by N1.
”Why did you say you had no connection with him at the Agrokor Parliamentary Committee?” Dalić was pressingly asked.
“Because the question on the board was different… Things get taken out of context, the lowest of passions get fed by that, they attach meanings [to things] that aren’t there… It would be interesting for me to see the content of your mails, because, for both me and for the public, there’d surely be interesting things to feed the lowest passions there. I also want to say that something like this could be done with the correspondence of any person,” Dalić responded.
Deflecting tends to reflect guilt, so, it isn’t really that flattering of a response on her part.
”I’m not going to resign. What makes you think that I’ve lost the confidence of the [coalition] partners? There are regular meetings held because we talk about all topics. This, the topic that has now taken up all of the media space, confirms everything that we’ve already said, that I was the main author of the law [Lex Agrokor], and that I was talking to experts who could offer help,” Dalić claimed.
She also said that the fact that DORH has been checking everything isn’t her issue.
“If any of the official institutions has something to look for, then I’ve got no problem, I worked on finding a solution for the biggest crisis to have hit Croatia since its independence, I had only a little time, there was no time for any kinds of assessment, public debate, discussions…” Dalić added that the law to which she was referring has been confirmed [to be constitutional] by the Constitutional Court.
As for the alleged texts Ivica Todorić spoke about with dogged determination to ”shed light on the truth”, Dalić said: “What I had the opportunity to see was an absolute forgery, a fabrication, a work for which I can’t find another description.”
PM Plenković briefly stated that he’ll see his coalition partners today, and only after that meeting will statements about the situation be made.
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