The members of the ruling coalition have supported the government's plan to buffer gas prices as of 1 April, Economy Minister Tomislav Coric said on Tuesday after a coalition meeting.

The parliamentary majority agreed with the plan for the government to respond in several areas, “first and foremost to protect the most vulnerable citizens and absorb part of the blow to HEP (power utility) and part of the blow through tax relief”, Coric said.

The government will increase allowances for those most vulnerable by examining all items that constitute gas and electricity bills as well as by acting on VAT, which is 13% on electricity and 25% on gas, after analyzing the fiscal effects.

The logic is to help households and ensure somewhat better liquidity for businesses, Ćorić said, adding that attempts will be made to avoid the price blow that most EU member states  have experienced.

He said Croatia would have “a considerably milder blow” as of 1 April than EU countries “where gas and electricity prices over the past year increased by even more than 50%.”

The government’s plan will be presented in detail in the weeks ahead, he added.

Coric would not say how much his ministry estimates gas prices will go up as of 1 April, but said they would not go up “either five times or 100%” as some claimed.

Regarding Zagreb businesses for which the City Gasworks has already raised prices, the minister said that as far as he knew, most started receiving higher bills in the last quarter of 2021 already. The contracts, he noted, were unilaterally annexed.

Asked what the government planned to do to help hospitals, kindergartens and schools with their gas bills, notably in parts of the country that financially are not as strong as Zagreb, Coric said unilaterally annexed contracts were a problem only in Zagreb.

“We won’t allow hospitals to be left without gas,” he said, adding that it is unacceptable that state and city-owned hospitals in Zagreb are treated differently in terms of gas prices.

He said the children’s home in the capital and everyone else who received unjustifiably high gas bills would have to “take legal action.”

Coric reiterated that merchants who unjustifiably raise prices after the introduction of the euro will be blacklisted, and said that displaying prices in both euro and kuna would help.

Asked if the time was right to introduce the euro given the high inflation, as claimed by the opposition Bridge party, he said the introduction of the euro was being questioned by those “who don’t have a clue about it.”

Introducing the euro will bring much bigger benefits than costs and Croatia should have been in the euro area years ago, he added.