Fortenova Grupa chief executive officer Fabris Perusko said in an interview with the Croatian Vecernji List daily on Monday that Fortenova still operates with a Russian co-owner.

“I first learned of Sberbank having agreed the sale of its SBK ART company with an investor from the United Arab Emirates literally a few minutes before Sberbank announced the sale on its website,” Perusko said.

“Shortly after that, Croatian media portals published an evidently previously prepared statement by the company’s buyer, and Fortenova Grupa’s management learned of it through the media, at the same time as the rest of the public,” he added.

Perusko said that no contact whatsoever had been established by the buyer of SBK ART or a representative for them with the Fortenova Grupa management until Thursday, 2 November, late in the afternoon, when a very short email arrived at the addresses of some of the executive directors and members of the Fortenova Grupa management board, after they saw the news in the media a few hours before.

Contacts other than that email message, consisting of a few sentences and made available also to the general public, had not occurred, he added.

Perusko also said that Miodrag Borojevic, who has been mentioned as a financial advisor in the said transaction, had resigned as a member of the Fortenova Management Board after it transpired that some of his actions were not in line with the company’s code of ethics. All the other members of the Management Board were acquainted with that, Perusko said, noting that the company did not comment on the details of the affair when it happened and would not do so now either.

I believe that when transactions as big as this one are concerned, it is practically impossible even for very experienced teams of financial advisors, let alone an individual, to make the right appraisal without information on the latest business data and sufficient time for an in-depth analysis, Perusko told the daily.