Former Labour Minister Mirando Mrsic of the SDP party and a former mayor of Dubrovnik, Andro Vlahusic of the Croatian People's Party (HNS), on Monday testified at the trial of former Sisak County Prefect, Marina Lovric-Merzel (SDP), charged with corruption, money laundering and embezzlement.

While testifying before Zagreb County Court today, Vlahusic said that during the ceremony of the opening of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival in 2010, Lovric-Merzel had attended the events at his invitation.

“Office-holders attended the opening of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival, including the then President, Ivo Josipovic, and I invited my friends from left political parties and with great certainty, I can definitely say that Prefect Lovric-Merzel attended the event.”

Vlahusic said he had a good relationship with Lovric-Merzel, as, he explained, they were connected by the fact that they had defeated the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ).

The then Sisak-Moslavina County Prefect used to come to Dubrovnik events, being accompanied by business people, the witness said.

Mirando Mrsic said that during his ministerial term he had cooperated with Lovric-Merzel while she had been at the helm of Sisak-Moslavina County, which was struggling with high youth jobless rates and the lowest pensions in comparison to Croatia on the whole.

“It is very likely that in 2012 I attended the “Celtic Night” event in Sisak and that on that occasion we were trying to solve the problem of unemployment of people under the age of 30, by exempting their employers from taxes. It was the usual custom to have a working dinner after a working visit, however, I can’t remember all that in greater detail due to the passage of time,” Mrsic said.

Lovric-Merzel and another three defendants plead not guilty

The former Social Democratic Party (SDP) head of Sisak-Moslavina County, Marina Lovric-Merzel, went on trial before Zagreb County Court in late June 2018 for bribe-taking, money laundering and embezzling public money.

The trial opened with the reading of an eight-count indictment, which lists all the crimes committed and alleges that the accused defrauded the county budget of several million kuna. The arraignment lasted more than an hour and a half.

Lovric-Merzel pleaded not guilty to all the charges.

Although the indictment was confirmed in late 2015, the start of the trial was delayed several times because Judge Ivan Turudic overturned the plea bargain between the prosecution and a co-defendant, businessman Zeljko Zuzic, who admitted in 2016 that he had given Lovric Merzel 100,000 euro in bribes.

Under the deal, Zuzic was to be given a suspended sentence of one year with four years’ probation, but Judge Turudic insisted that the suspended sentence was incommensurate with the crime alleged.

The USKOK prosecution twice filed applications for protection of legality, which the Supreme Court eventually granted saying that courts should not intervene in the content of plea bargains between defendants and prosecutors, but should only verify their legality.

At a pre-trial hearing, the accused Zvonko Rozic, a former CEO of the Hrvatske Sume forest management company, pleaded guilty and was given a suspended sentence of eight months with two years’ probation.

The other defendants accused by the Office for the Suppression of Corruption and Organised Crime (USKOK) in this case include Silvijo Kobescak, chairman of the supervisory board of the Ceste Sisak road company, Bernard Popec, who sold a building for the Accidents and Emergencies Service to the county authorities at an inflated price, and Dalibor Rozankovic, Lovric-Merzel’s nephew They all pleaded not guilty.