Deputy leader of the Zagreb branch of former mayor Milan Bandic's BM 365 - Labour and Solidarity Party, Slavko Kojic, on Wednesday described as "scandalous" Mayor Tomislav Tomasevic's claim that the amount of City's debt was equal to its revenue, far above the 20 percent limit permitted by law.

“The city cannot owe more than 20% of its revenue, the mayor told a gross lie in the City Assembly,” Kojic, a former long-lasting head of the city’s finance department during Bandic’s term, claimed at a news conference.

He went on to say that the city could not have borrowed an amount exceeding 20 percent of its revenue because borrowing was conditional on the Finance Ministry’s consent.

The 20 percent limit does not refer to the total debt but to the debt due for payment in a given year, he said.

Kojic recalled that at its last session the City Assembly made a decision to borrow 336 million kuna, adding that had the 20 percent limit been exceeded, the Finance Ministry would not have approved additional borrowing.

He also noted that the Standard&Poor’s rating agency would not have changed Zagreb’s credit rating of BB- to one with a stable instead of negative outlook if Zagreb’s debt amounted to 100 percent of its revenue.

Measuring the debt of the city public transportation company ZET, the multiutility conglomerate Zagreb Holding, and the City of Zagreb against the revenue or budget of only one of them, in this case, the City of Zagreb, without taking into account budget users, is ridiculous, said Kojic.

He noted that data on ZET’s debt in the amount of 900 million kuna, Zagreb Holding’s debt of 4.9 billion kuna and the City of Zagreb’s debt of around 2.4 billion kuna did not depart significantly from what had been published in the spring.

Kojic admitted that the problem of the capital city’s finances was not small and that the former city administration had “many sins” but that the main cause of the problem was legislative changes due to which Zagreb had been shortchanged by more than seven billion kuna over a period of six years.