President Zoran Milanovic said on Thursday the people arrested in an anti-corruption operation in Zagreb were part of the circle of the late mayor Milan Bandić, "to whom the HDZ extended brotherly assistance."

“I don’t want to prejudge. By what one sees, it’s a chain. After the (local) elections, naturally, so that DORH (State Attorney’s Office) and USKOK (anti-corruption office) wouldn’t do their job before the elections,” he told the press.

Milanovic said he was not claiming the wrong people were taken into custody but that they were all part of Bandić’s circle. He said “the HDZ, that is (Prime Minister Andrej) Plenkovic and his gang, extended brotherly assistance” to the late mayor of Zagreb.

“You should ask him if he’s embarrassed because of that now,” he added.

Milanović said that after the arrest of public broadcaster HRT director Kazimir Bacic in the anti-corruption operation, the HRT’s news and political programme should be cancelled but not the licence fee because, he said, there were jobs nobody but the HRT would do, such as “educational and heritage things.”

Maybe the economy programme should be retained, he said, but there is no need for “daily politics” in the public service because “it’s poison when the authorities pay you and decide about you, you’re dependent.”

He said that as a service of the ruling HDZ, when it came to politics, the HRT should be relieved of that burden.

Milanovic said there were good independent media as well as others which he called “debt collection firms.”