Croatian authorities are looking into the sale of Russian Sberbank's stake in Fortenova Group to a private investor from the United Arab Emirates, Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said on Saturday.

“Sberbank had expected to sell its stake to Croatian pension funds for €500 million, but that operation failed and took a different course. We are looking into what happened exactly,” Plenkovic told a press conference during a visit to Bjelovar, about 90 kilometres northeast of Zagreb.

“It’s very strange to me that someone comes and shells out such a large amount of money in a single day,” Plenkovic said.

Sberbank had obviously sought to sell its stake for as much money as possible, given that this is a bank not specialising either in agriculture or in the food industry, the PM said in answer to questions from the press about the sale of the 43.4% stake in Fortenova Group.

“The pension funds launched the acquisition of this stake on their own initiative. The government issued all the approvals, making all the checks, in line with the laws. At that point Sberbank expected to sell its stake to the pension funds for €500 million,” Plenkovic said.

The acquisition was halted by a pension fund linked to the German company Allianz for still unknown reasons, he added.

“After that, Sberbank took another road and found an investor from the United Arab Emirates who paid out a large sum of money within a very short period of time. We will check what happened, whether everything was in line with the sanctions package imposed by the EU,” the PM said.

He recalled that the EU had so far imposed eight packages of sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and that at one point Sberbankl also came under the sanctions.

Plenkovic said that the most important thing was that Fortenova was functioning normally. He noted that the government was its owner and that what was happening right now was the change of one of the co-owners.

Sberbank became a co-owner of what was then Agrokor thanks to a loan of €1.2 billion, after which it converted its claim into a co-ownership stake.

“The company that was brought to bankruptcy was dropped into our lap. We saved it by adopting a special law, preserving jobs in Croatia and neighbouring countries, saving all the family farms, paying the suppliers, and helping the company back on its feet,” Plenkovic said.