An extraordinary general shareholders' assembly of the INA oil company on Friday appointed the Croatian members to the Supervisory Board - Damir Mikuljan, Davor Filipovic and Branimir Skurla - for a term of six months, INA said on Friday via the Zagreb Stock Exchange.

The decision comes after the government on Wednesday proposed Mikuljan, Filipovic and Skurla for the Supervisory Board for a maximum period of six months. The government recommended that Mikuljan chair the Supervisory Board.

Mikuljan was already a member of the Supervisory Board while Filipovic and Skurla will replace Luka Burilovic and Damir Vandjelic.

Vandjelic, who was the chairman of the Supervisory Board, and Burilovic, had been on INA’s Supervisory Board since mid-December 2016, and Mikuljan since June 2017. Vandjelic’s and Burilovic’s terms end tomorrow.

The INA Management Board in November had proposed that Mikuljan, Burilovic and Vandjelic remain on the Supervisory Board for another six months, however, the government decided to nominate Filipovic and Skurla.

The media speculated that failure to reappoint Vandjelic was connected with his recent resignation as the head of the post-earthquake Reconstruction Fund. Vandjelic then said then that his job in the fund was finished.

Commenting on the government’s proposal on Wednesday, Economy Minister Tomislav Coric said that both Filipovic and Skurla were proposed for the Supervisory Board owing to their biographies and that they were not being rewarded in any way.

Asked if the nomination of Filipovic was a consolation prize after he lost the election for the mayor of Zagreb (he was the ruling HDZ party’s candidate), Coric rejected the claim and said that Filipovic was a lecturer at the Zagreb Faculty of Economics and had previous experience as a member or chair of supervisory boards.

INA’s Supervisory Board has nine members, three of whom (including Board chair) are nominated by Croatia, which holds a 44.84% stake in INA, four by the Hungarian oil company MOL, which holds a 49.08% interest in INA, and one by INA employees.

MOL’s representatives on the Supervisory Board – József Molnár, László Uzsoki, Zsuzsanna Ortutay, Gabriel Szabó and Domokos Szollár – were elected last December for a term of four years.

The employees’ representative on the Supervisory Board is Jasna Pipunic.