Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said on Thursday that the head of the Aircraft Maintenance and Repair Centre (ZTC), Zdravko Klanac, would be dismissed over a meeting with representatives of the Russian Aero Technik Service (ATS), which took place after the EU imposed sanctions on Russia.

Plenković said at a news conference in Zagreb that he had told Defence Minister Mario Banozic to relieve Klanac of his duties due to his “incoherent decision” to receive ATS executives in the current circumstances.

The government had no information about the Russian delegation’s visit to ZTC, Plenkovic said, asking reporters whether they thought that “the Security and Intelligence Agency (SOA)  is monitoring all the people and telephones in Croatia.”

“Croatia is not a Big Brother show in which it is known who meets whom or who calls whom,” said Plenkovic.

In reference to President Zoran Milanovic’s statement that some cabinet ministers, including Defence Minister Mario Banozic, are behaving like “suicide drones” only to protect their chief, Plenkovic responded that Milanovic started to behave abnormally after the arrest of his close friend Dragan Kovacevic, former CEO of the Janaf oil pipeline operator.

Commenting on the invitation to Kovacevic by the Anti-Corruption Council for a public hearing in Parliament, the PM said this resembled a situation in which a family bully, who beats his wife and children, is invited to a conference on combating domestic violence.

He said that all that was about “the complicity between the buddies” from the Slovenska Street club, that is Milanovic, Kovacevic and representatives of the Most party, against the government which they slander as being traitorous and Quisling-like.

In response to a reporter’s remark that some of the ministers of his government had also visited Kovacevic’s club in Slovenska Street, Plenkovic said that that was not the same because they had not frequented that place during the lock-down period in 2020, imposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.