The retrial of former prime minister Ivo Sanader in the so-called Hypo affair started at the Zagreb County Court on Friday (March 23) with Sanader entering a not guilty plea.

“I do not feel guilty,” said Sanader after the prosecutor from the USKOK organised crime bureau read the indictment on war profiteering charges. Sanader is accused that during the time he was deputy foreign minister in the mid-1990s he accepted a bribe from the Austrian Hypo bank which had at the time issued a loan at the to the government for the purchase of properties to house its embassies abroad.

Sanader’s defence will try to prove that Sanader couldn’t have commited the crime he is charged with as they claim he was not the government’s negotiator in the Hypo bank deal, and also that the statute of limitations has come into effect.

Sanader said Hypo bank gave Croatia the loan upon recommendation by then foreign minister of Austria, Alois Mock, and that interest rates for the loan were half of those offered on the market.

In the original trial to the former prime minister and leader of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) in 2012, Sanader was also convicted for taking bribe from Hungary’s oil company MOL, and sentenced to a total of 10 years in prison. On appeals, the Supreme Court first reduced his sentence to eight and a half years, and then rescinded in the verdict in 2014 on account of procedural errors.The court then ordered a retrial, with the two cases to be tried separately.