The Zagreb City Assembly on Monday adopted the proposal by Mayor Tomislav Tomasevic to take out a €240 million loan for the Zagreb Holding Group, the municipal company controlling all the city's utility services. Most of the loan, more than €221 million, will be spent on financing the company's debt, state agency Hina said on Monday.

Hina did not clarify what Zagreb Holding’s debt was in total.

The greenlight for the borrowing was made without the presence of the opposition councillors who walked out of the meeting before this topic was put on the agenda on Monday afternoon. Apart from the opposition, also some of the councilors of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), a junior partner in the city’s ruling coalition, were against the new borrowing. Of the five-member club of the SDP party, two members, including the assembly’s speaker, Josko Klisovic, voted for the borrowing.

Opposition councillors did not cite any reason not to support the loan.

Some €221.6 million of the pending loan, financed by six different banks, will be used to re-financing the existing debt, and €18.4 million will be spent for general business activities of the city’s multi-utility conglomerate.

The president of the Social Democratic Party’s Zagreb branch, Viktor Gotovac, on Sunday asked SDP deputies to resign from all positions in the city assembly after the SDP’s city committee on Friday cancelled a coalition agreement with We Can!

The reasons for SDP’s abandonment of the coalition led by mayor Tomasevic’s green-left group are unclear.