In a speech in the Croatian Parliament on Wednesday, Social Democrat MP Goran Maras called on the state attorney to open an investigation on the non-transparent communication between Economy Minister Martina Dalic and authors of the controversial law on company crisis management passed in April last year.

Maras also said Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic should sack Dalic.

“The state attorney should get involved at once, and Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic should immediately sack the minister (Dalic) who had compromised not only him and the government, but also the entire state,” said Maras in Parliament, commenting the recent articles published by Index.hr.

Earlier on Wednesday, the news website Index.hr had published Dalic’s private e-mail correspondence showing that she had secretly consulted owners and CEO’s of private-owned brokerages, consultancies, and law firms in drawing up specific provisions of the law, dubbed Lex Agrokor in the media.

Index.hr said that the companies involved had profited from the law, which was passed in April 2017 and which allowed state-appointed management to take over the privately-owned indebted food company Agrokor, as the crisis management had proceeded to spend more than 500 million kuna (€67.5 million) over the last 12 months on external consultancies.

Asked whether Prime Minister Plenkovic was responsible for this, Maras said that this would become clear by the way he reacts to this development. If he keeps tolerating Dalic, who is also Deputy Prime Minister, that would mean he is “in cahoots with her.”

According to Maras, eminent legal experts – such as Petar Miladin from the Zagreb Law School – had warned that Lex Agrokor had significant differences from the similar Italian law it was modelled after, and that its authors were going into uncharted territory, which might eventually result in huge damage to Agrokor and Croatia.

“Miladin was right when he said those things just as the law was being passed, and they simply ignored it. Not because they felt they were better experts than him, but because they knew the direction they were heading in. They knew that they were going to get millions out of Agrokor, under the auspices of Martina Dalic. And now, we will see how deep was (Prime Minister) Plenkovic involved in this,” Maras said.

Maras said this case deserved an investigation committee which should discover what exactly went on when the Lex Agrokor bill was being prepared.

Although opposition MPs had asked for months who exactly drew up the hastily prepared law designed to save the country’s biggest company from bankruptcy, Economy Minister Dalic had dodged the question for months, before telling reporters in February that the law was written solely by her.

The first state-appointed emergency manager at Agrokor, Ante Ramljak, had resigned in February amid allegations that once at Agrokor, he had hired his former consultancy for a lucrative fee. Doubts about possible conflict of interest have also led to a no-confidence motion filed by opposition MPs in March, which Dalic later survived by a slim 76-71 margin.

In addition, the publication of Dalic’s e-mails came only a day after the Constitutional Court had ruled that Lex Agrokor is legal, dimissing complaints to its provisions filed by 12 different applicants.

Commenting on Index.hr allegations, an unnamed government source told N1 on Wednesday that this was merely an attempt to undermine the settlement agreement with Agrokor’s creditors, which is a pre-requisite for the company’s orderly restructuring, and which must be completed by July at the latest.

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