Former Prime Minister and former leader of the ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party, Ivo Sanader, was acquitted on Wednesday of charges for war profiteering in a third re-trial in the Hypo Bank corruption scandal, having been found guilty twice in earlier trials.

The verdict was announced by Zagreb County Court judge Sasa Lui, after the prosecution and defence presented their closing statements last week and Sanader once again pleaded not guilty of war profiteering, stressing that he stood by the depositions he had presented in the previous trials.

This was Sanader’s was third trial for the Hypo Bank case. He was found guilty in two earlier trials, in 2012 and in 2018, and both verdicts were later overturned by the Constitutional and Supreme Courts.

The prosecutors accused Sanader of receiving a commission of 3.6 million kuna from the Austrian Hypo Bank while serving as Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs in late 1994 and early 1995 after the government took out a loan to purchase embassy buildings abroad.

According to the bureaucratic explanation offered by prosecutors, “in the difficult financial and economic situation caused by the war Sanader acquired illegal financial benefit that was disproportionate to the threatened fundamental values of the state and the social community, as well as state interests.”

Since stepping down from his post in 2009 after serving as prime minister for sex years, Sanader was implicated in a number of corruption scandals allegedly committed during his time in power

He has been in prison since April 2019, when the Supreme Court increased his sentence for corruption in the Planinska Street case to six years in prison.

In mid-October 2021, the highest court partially confirmed the verdict from the retrial in the Fimi Media case, under which HDZ as an organization was ordered to pay 3.5 million kuna in fines for siphoning money from state institutions and companies through a front company which claimed to offer marketing services. Sanader’s sentence in that case was reduced from eight to seven years.

At the end of October 2021, the Supreme Court confirmed the first-instance verdict by which Sanader was sentenced to six years for accepting a bribe from the head of the Hungarian energy group MOL, Zsolt Hernadi, while Hernadi was sentenced in absentia to two years in prison.

In mid-November 2021, the Supreme Court upheld the only acquittal of Sanader so far, when he and businessman Robert Jezic were acquitted of selling cheap electricity to Jezic’s company, which caused financial damage to the state-owned power board Hep.