The decision of the Council of the European Union to recognise Croatia's law on emergency administration as a legitimate insolvency procedure in the EU does not mean that the law is valid in Slovenia, Slovenia's outgoing Prime Minister Miro Cerar said on Thursday, adding that the EU had only "technically verified" the law.
“The Council of the EU’s decision constitutes only the technical verification of an act, that (Croatian) law is not valid in Slovenia, Slovenian laws are in force in Slovenia,” Cerar told reporters on the margins of a regular summit meeting of leaders of EU countries in Brussels.
The Croatian law on state-appointed emergency administration in systemically important companies “cannot be part of our legal order, as our Supreme Court has stated in its decision. If someone is saying differently, they are either pretending not to understand EU law, or actually do not understand it,” Cerar said in what the Slovenian state news agency STA described as a very sharp response to Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic’s description of the inclusion of the law in the EU acquis communautaire as a big political success for Croatia.
The inclusion of the law – dubbed by the media Lex Agrokor as it was drafted in passed in April 2017 to help save the food and retail group Agrokor from bankruptcy – on the agenda of the General Affairs Council on Tuesday was opposed only by Slovenian representatives at the council.
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Cerar said they did so for reasons of principle, so as to prevent, in future procedures, cases when someone “might infer that Slovenia recognises Lex Agrokor as part of its legal order.”
Plenkovic said that the Council of the EU decision, to be published in the EU’s Official Journal in the coming days, constitutes a political success, as it has made Lex Agrokor part of the EU acquis communautaire.
The law itself was heavily criticised in Croatia ever since its passing, and led to the so-called Hotmail affair when e-mails of experts who had drafted the bill were leaked and published by Index.hr news website, which led to the resignation of Economy Minister Martina Dalic in May.
Earlier that month, Croatia’s Constitutional Court dismissed 12 complaints lodged against the law, including one filed by Agrokor’s founder Ivica Todoric, who is currently in the United Kingdom, contesting Croatia’s extradition request.
In spite of the controversies, the emergency administration, whose mandate is set to expire on July 10, has earlier this month agreed a debt-for-equity settlement plan with the company’s biggest creditors, set to be voted on in a Zagreb court hearing on July 4.
Agrokor, who employed some 60,000 across the region before its debt crisis started in early 2017, owns a number of companies in Croatia and neighbouring countries, including one of Slovenia’s largest retail chains, Mercator.
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