Leader of opposition party Zivi Zid Ivan Vilibor Sincic and party secretary Tihomir Lukanic reported on Friday Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic and Finance Minister Zdravko Maric to the government’s Conflict of Interest Committee over meetings they had with the expert group which helped draft controversial Lex Agrokor in 2017.

“Plenkovic met with the group in the government building on February 26 (2017), February 28, March 6, March 23, and March 24. That’s seven times, and the group had another meeting in the government one more time on March 29 without him because he was abroad on business. There are indications of other meetings visible from the depositions, but without dates and names of those present,” Sincic told reporters.

On Wednesday, N1 exclusively released transcriptions of the depositions given to Croatian anti-corruption police Uskok by the former Economy Minister Martina Dalic, along with former crisis manager at Agrokor Ante Ramljak and Dalic’s advisor Zoran Besak.

The transcripts contain a number of contentious issues regarding the process through which Prime Minister Plenkovic’s government tried to handle the threat of bankruptcy at the food and retail group Agrokor, the largest single company in the country at the time.

Sincic said Plenkovic entered conflict of interest because he works for the state on the one hand, and, on the other, he had allowed a group of his friends, led by lawyer Boris Savoric, and Dalic’s friends to write the law which enabled them to arrange profitable business deals for themselves.

“The Prime Minister lied, he deceived the public. From the start he tried to cover everything up with the entire cabinet. However, the pieces are falling into place. It was all scandalous and shameful back then, severe conflict of interest and corruption. Now the situation is at boiling point, and it still isn’t over,” Sincic said.

The complaint against minister Maric was submitted because he met three times with his former employer Ivica Todoric (former owner of Agrokor), instead of just once, and because he attended five meetings of the expert group, he said.

“Maric lied the first time before the Conflict of Interest Committee, and he lied to the public. The question is who Maric was working for at that time,” Sincic said.

“All of this is scandalous. Plenkovic was obviously not working in the interest of Croatia or its people, but he had his eye on dividing the prize among the expert group members,” he added.

He asked why, out of some ten members of the expert group, the state prosecutor’s office DORH did not question all of them when investigating the charges filed against Dalic in June by the Zivi Zid and Slobodna Hrvatska parties on suspicion of conflict of interest. The allegations were eventually dismissed.

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