Economy and Sustainable Development Minister Tomislav Coric said on Thursday the Fokus party's demand that he be sacked was as expected and that he was not worried.

The opposition party today gave the prime minister 24 hours to sack Coric, claiming he is implicated in many affairs, including the JANAF case, or it will initiate that in parliament together with the rest of the opposition.

“On the one hand, that’s as expected because politically we are entering autumn, while on the other, what to expect? The opposition lost the election. Some of them had very big ambitions four, five months ago, and now they find themselves in a situation in which they can vent those ambitions and frustrations in this way,” Coric told the press.

He said that on the one hand, it was something he could do nothing about, while on the other “there’s nothing there, unfortunately.”

Coric said he was not worried about the demand because he had been in office four years now and that he functioned in such a way that everything he did, he did “the best I can and so that Croatia can benefit from it as much as possible.”

He said he was not worried either about the possibility of losing the minister’s office even if a no-confidence motion failed, which happened to many ministers before. “It doesn’t worry me because I told you how I function.”

He went on to say that he felt no responsibility for having lunched a few times with Dragan Kovacevic, the former CEO of the JANAF oil pipeline operator who has been arrested on suspicion of influence peddling and taking kickbacks, “because I had no idea that what happened several weeks ago would happen.”

Coric said this autumn would be economically very uncertain and demanding, and that he would focus on that.

If the opposition initiative arrives, he said he would respond to it and that Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic could consider at any moment whether a minister should continue doing their job.