Opposition parties in the Croatian parliament said on Wednesday that the decision of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court rejecting Croatia's application for a review in the INA arbitration case from 2016 is an indication of how weak Croatia is and how much Croatian citizens suffer because of that.

The government was informed today by its legal representatives regarding the decision of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court of 23 September rejecting Croatia’s application for a review of the judgment passed on 23 December 2016 in arbitration proceedings by the Arbitration Tribunal, established according to the rules of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), government spokesman Marko Milic said earlier on Wednesday.

The request for a review of the 2016 arbitration award in the case between Croatia and MOL was submitted in February this year, based on a decision by the Croatian Supreme Court to uphold a verdict by the Zagreb County Court proclaiming Ivo Sanader and Zsolt Tamas Hernádi guilty of the crimes of receiving and giving bribes. The Swiss court found clear disagreements, which essentially relate to the different evaluations of the testimony of several participants in the scam, especially the testimony of Robert Jezic.

Referring to the decision of the Swiss court, MP Dalija Oreskovic (Centre) said that “we do not have any information about the arbitration proceedings, we do not know what arguments the Croatian side presented or what the witnesses said.”

“The only thing we know is what we could see in the media and that is that some of the witnesses said one thing in Croatian courts and something completely different before international arbitral tribunals. That situation best shows how weak we are as a state, how poorly our representatives represent us, with all our citizens suffering the consequences, not only in the form of economic conditions they live in but by being deprived of all their rights,” said Oreskovic.

Grmoja: Croatian judiciary is too slow

Nikola Grmoja (Most party) compared the decision of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court with today’s acquittal of Ivo Sanader at the Zagreb County Court in a retrial for war profiteering in the Hypo Bank scam, noting that Croatia’s judiciary is too slow. Delayed justice is no justice at all, regardless of the final verdict, he added.

If we consider the verdict against Sanader and the verdict related to INA, that must have influenced the outcome of the arbitration and Croatia’s request for a review before the Swiss court, Grmoja said. These are all the problems of Croatia’s judiciary that affect all Croatian citizens. To say that Croatia’s judiciary is independent is ridiculous, he added.

“It was Plenkovic’s government that filed the application for a review and they should be asked what kind of evidence they presented and what they did. I think that the HDZ did everything to ensure that we did not fare well in arbitration cases. In the arbitration case initiated by the Zoran Milanovic government, of the six demands, MOL won only in one,  concerning the liberalisation of the gas market,” said Grmoja. “We need to be more precise when we say that the Hungarians got everything they demanded,” he added.

As for claims coming from the ranks of the ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) as to who is financing the opposition, Grmoja requested from the chairman of the parliamentary Committee for National Security, Sinisa Hajdas-Doncic, that it be investigated who received a loan from the PPD gas company and who is being financed with money connected to the Russians, Hungarians or other centres of power.

“I am calmly waiting for that investigation,” he said.