The USKOK anti-corruption office has indicted the Mayor of Kutina, Zlatko Babic, and three others for bribing city councillors and influence peddling in 2019 and 2020 in a case dubbed Eko Moslavina.

Without citing any names, USKOK said on Monday that along with Babic, the former president of the Kutina City Council, Davor Kljakic, and independent councillor Drazen Kinderman and opposition councillor Darko Kolsek were also indicted.

At the time relevant to the indictment, Babic was president of the HDZ party’s Kutina branch and Kljakić was president of the HSLS party’s city branch. The two parties held a majority in the city council.

Babic is accused of fixing a job for Kinderman’s son in the Eko Moslavina company in exchange for the councillor’s support for the adoption the 2021 city budget and its revision.

Babic also made a deal with Kolsek that in exchange for his vote, he would be given a pay rise in the company where he is employed.

USKOK underlined that Kljakic, at Babic’s request, ordered Adrijana Cvrtila, the director of Eko Moslavina company which the city has a majority stake in, to hire Kinderman’s son and increase Kolsek’s salary, who was an employee of Eko Moslavina.

Kljakic is also accused of ordering Cvrtila to extend employment contracts for persons or family members of persons with whom he had private and business relationships or to provide them with better-paid positions.

Cvrtila, who was the director of the Kutina utility company Eko Moslavina, went public in 2021 claiming that Babic and Kljakic were putting pressure on her to employ party members and relatives of councillors, or raise their salaries, so that those councillors would vote for the city budget and its revision.

She reported both of them to USKOK.  Babic denied the accusations of political recruitment, asserting that the attacks on him were fabricated. Last September, Babic announced that he was leaving the HDZ because he did not want the party to be “dragged through the mud.”