ZAGREB, May 23, 2018 – The parliamentary committees on economy and on the constitution, standing orders and political system at their joint session on Wednesday accepted with a majority vote Prime Minister Andrej Plenković’s proposal to appoint Tomislav Tolušić as Deputy Prime Minister and Darko Horvat as Economy Minister, following last week’s resignation of Deputy Prime Minister and Economy Minister Martina Dalić.
The appointment of the two candidate will not be discussed at a plenary session of parliament, but MPs will vote on them on Friday.
The four-hour session at which the PM introduced his associates focused on the Agrokor ailing food and retail conglomerate and Plenković, whom the opposition questioned mostly about the email scandal and the Borg group, said that “the only mistake in that process was the fact that those who helped write Lex Agrokor were later included in the process as subcontractors.”
“This is why Ante Ramljak and Martina Dalić left and it is a pity that this has cast a shadow over the entire process and on everything that was done right,” Plenković said.
“This situation is the result of poor business and financial decisions of Agrokor’s owner and we only had five and a half weeks to adopt the law and with everything else on the government’s plate at the moment, certainly, not every article in that law is perfect. The intention was not to jeopardise the core of the economic process by a political decision. We did the best we could in the shortest time possible, with good intentions, calm conscience and clean hands and whatever has not been done right, we are correcting now. This process needs to be brought to an end so that we can achieve a quality and sustainable settlement and so that we can be able to send a message to foreign investors that Croatia can find a solution in the shortest period of time and that it is not running away from problems,” Plenković said.
Gordan Maras of the Social Democratic Party insisted on questioning the prime minister which the head of the committee on the Constitution Željko Reiner attempted to prevent which then caused a smaller incident after which Maras left the session as a sign of protest.
