Former CEO of the state-owned Janaf oil pipeline operator, Dragan Kovacevic, who is currently indicted in a corruption trial, was invited to speak with the so-called Anti-Corruption Council before members on parliament on Thursday. He told MPs that while he was head of Janaf PM Andrej Plenkovic had "suggested signing a memorandum implying the closing of the Sisak refinery," which he refused to do. 

Speaking about the role of PM Plenkovic and former energy minister Tomislav Coric in oil company Ina’s decision to redirect Croatian oil to Hungary to be processed there, Kovacevic said the meeting in question had been prepared at the ministerial level and that the pressure to shut down the Sisak oil refinery had been going on for 10 years.

“It was simply demanded that the Sisak refinery be closed down because it was making losses,” Kovadevic said, adding that he refused to do it “because he considered it to be a matter of not just corporate interests but also strategic and national interests.”

Kovacevic said that there was one meeting at the prime minister’s office and that along with Plenkovic, it was attended also by Coric, three of Plenkovic’s advisors, and Plenkovic’s deputy chief-of-staff Tena Misetic.

The former Janaf CEO said that he had been invited to consultations to state his opinion on the plan to close down the refinery, claiming that he repeated what he had said a few years before that – that the plan was “not good.” Coric was indecisive while Plenkovic suggested to go ahead with the memorandum, Kovacevic said.

“I thought that they would propose that the (Janaf) shareholders should replace me, but Janaf had excellent results at the time and it was not easy to replace me,” he said.

Kovacevic said the main point of the memorandum was for a connection to the Janaf pipeline to be built in Sisak to make it possible to transport oil from Ina’s storage facilities towards Hungary, which, he said, meant the closing down of the Sisak refinery.

The Anti-Corruption Council had also invited Plenkovic, Coric and Misetic to today’s public hearing but they did not show up.

The ruling HDZ-led majority claims that public hearings can be held only by competent parliament committees, and HDZ members declined to attend the hearing, saying they “did not want to give it legitimacy because they considered it to be unlawful.”