Chairman of the Jadranski Sindikat worker's union, Boris Cerovac, commented for N1 television on Thursday the amended restructuring plan for the Uljanik Group, which is to be sent to Brussels for approval.

Cerovac said that the unions have seen the five separate parts of the restructuring plan that Brussels had previously said needed fixing. One of these included the proposal that the government and the strategic investor should share the restructuring cost (estimated in September to amount to €584 million) in a 60-40 ratio. This has now been revised to 50-50.

He added that the plan also included compensation measures, which include reducing the number of workers, as well as the space occupied by the shipbuilding business.

“The number of workers keeps changing, and now that a large number of workers has already left, it remains to be seen if any further lay-offs are necessary, perhaps some job re-training might be necessary for existing workers, but the overall number of employees should stay at 3,000, under the condition that we have three ships in construction (at any time). Those three thousand would include subcontractors, and that would be an optimal number,” Cerovac said.

He added that compensation measures in the final version of the restructuring plan might also include re-purposing some of the plots of land owned by the shipyard. Asked to comment whether this meant the company would go into real estate business, Cerovac said that “this is the idea pushed by Uljanik management, along with (the strategic investor) Mr Koncar. We are not satisfied with this, we want some changes to this idea.”

Follow N1 via mobile apps for Android | iPhone/iPad | Windows| and social media on Twitter | Facebook.