ZAGREB, April 26, 2018 – Former Foreign Minister Mate Granić on Thursday testified at the retrial of former prime minister Ivo Sanader in the Hypo Bank case, reiterating his previous testimony, namely that Sanader, who is on trial for war profiteering over the alleged bribe taking, was in charge of the negotiations with Austrian Hypo Bank about a loan to Croatia for the purchase of embassy residencies in the mid-1990s.
Ivo Sanader, a former deputy foreign minister and former prime minister, is charged with having received 3.6 million kuna as a kickback for the loan agreement with the Hypo bank when he was Granić’s deputy. “I fully stand by my testimony from November 2011 and I am prepared to answer any question,” Granić said after his previous testimony was read to him in court.
At the request of Sanader’s defence team, Granić repeated the chronology of the deal with Hypo Bank. He recalled that everything started with a letter from Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock who notified him that “an ambitious bank from Carinthia was willing to grant a loan to Croatia for the purchase of buildings for its diplomatic missions.”
It was a time when there were no foreign banks on the Croatian market and the government could not obtain a loan on international financial markets, he added. “After that I talked to President Franjo Tuđman and Prime Minister Nikica Valentić, and notified deputy Sanader to take over the communications and negotiations.”
According to Granić’s previous testimonies, in 1999 he took out a 300,000 German mark housing loan, negotiated by Sanader. Once he left politics, Granić worked as a consultant for Hypo Bank and received 200,000 euro for his services.
Sanader’s defence again objected to the veracity of Granić’s testimony.
Sanader had been found guilty in this case, but the final verdict was quashed by the Constitutional Court in 2014 and a retrial was ordered to take place before the Zagreb County Court.
