ZAGREB, May 12, 2018 – MOST’s political secretary Nikola Grmoja said on Friday that the party had gathered signatures of 30 MPs and submitted a motion to reinstate the Agrokor inquiry commission so that parliament could discuss current developments surrounding the ailing Agrokor food and retail conglomerate.
“That means that next week we will have one item during which we can debate on the entire contaminated process around Agrokor and particularly with regard to the new details that are being leaked to the public every hour,” Grmoja told a press conference.
He underscored that MOST had waited for the outcome of a meeting between the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and its coalition partners, but nothing happened even though the entire public expected them to make a move, he said. “What else needs to happen before we see a normal reaction from the government and prime minister,” Grmoja said.
MOST is proud because the difference between them and those who are in HDZ today can now be seen. “This is one of the biggest scandals in the history of Croatian politics and it requires the resignation of the prime minister and the entire government,” Grmoja added.
Responding to claims by Prime Minister Andrej Plenković that MOST, as HDZ’s coalition partner at the time, knew everything concerning the preparation of Lex Agrokor, Grmoja said that MOST indeed insisted that experts be called in to analyse the financial situation in Agrokor but that they did not “coordinate or transform those who wrote the law.” “We were for experts, but not for those experts to be engaged, which is in fact what happened after we left the government,” Grmoja said.
Earlier in the day, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) reported that they had gathered 30 signatures for a motion in parliament to debate the latest developments at Agrokor as the so-called “Hotmail Scandal” has shown that there were elements of criminal offences in the entire process of preparing and writing Lex Agrokor. SDP advised that it would be “tactically better for MOST to submit their initiative next week so that Agrokor can be the topic of debate for two weeks running.”