ZAGREB, August 25, 2018 – GLAS party leader Anka Mrak Taritaš said on Friday that it was now undoubtedly clear that Prime Minister Andrej Plenković and his ministers had lied to the Croatian public about the so-called Borg group and Agrokor, and that they had used state institutions to help a particular interest group gain significant material benefit.
The entire procedure surrounding the Borg group and Agrokor points to the fact that that episode was a huge lie and deceit of Croatian citizens, Mrak Taritaš told a press conference, a day after former economy minister Martina Dalić’s depositions in the Agrokor case made to the Chief State Prosecutor’s Office (DORH) were released on Wednesday night by the N1 commercial television channel.
“It has transpired that Prime Minister Plenković and Finance Minister Zdravko Marić knew everything about the Borg group and I would dare say that the leader of that group was the prime minister,” Mrak Taritaš said, adding that Plenković had put Croatia “into the jaws of the HDZ’s crony capitalism”, showing that he did not know how to run the country.
As for the information that the government submitted incorrect information to the Conflict of Interest Commission about Minister Marić attending just two meetings on Agrokor, Mrak Taritaš underlined that the case of one state institution lying to another was unprecedented.
Asked whether GLAS has a solution for the situation in the shipbuilding sector and the strike at the Uljanik and 3. Maj docks because workers haven’t received their wages, Mrak Taritaš said that it is the responsibility of the prime minister and government to decide whether Croatia needs shipbuilding anymore and in what form.
Following the publishing of Dalić’s statement to the USKOK anti-corruption office in which she notes that she prevented the contents of a meeting regarding the state’s intervention in the ailing Agrokor food and retail conglomerate from being released by the media, MOST opposition party political secretary Nikola Grmoja has called for an urgent meeting of the parliamentary Committee on Information, Computerisation and the Media, MOST said in a press release on Friday.
“Just to what extent the incumbent government’s arrogance and impudence can go can be seen in the fact that its former deputy prime minister Martina Dalić quite nonchalantly, as if this was normal procedure, in her deposition to USKOK, said that she personally prevented certain information from being published. Now it’s obvious that Dalić used the media for her own personal PR channel and hid essentially vital information about Agrokor from the public,” Grmoja said.
