Zagreb Mayor Tomislav Tomasevic said on Tuesday that a revision of the city's "fictitious and unrealistic" budget would be made at the end of September and that the 400 million kuna (€53 million) budget cuts made since his administration took office in June were done to deal with the city's "financial skeletons in the closet."

Tomasevic described the current 2021 budget adopted during the time of late mayor Milan Bandic, as “fictitious,” because the budget formally projected a 1.1 billion kuna (€147 million) in revenue from future sale of city-owned plots of land, even though, Tomasevic says, municipal officials later admitted that they did in fact intend to sell any of it.

“A revision of the 2021 budget – i.e. changes to the fictitious budget adopted by the previous ruling majority, will be on the City Assembly’s agenda on 30 September,” Tomasevic told reporters.

“The budget revision is essential because of the unrealistic estimates of budget items, as well as because of the need for a transparent presentation of the structure of revenues and expenditures,” he said.

Tomasevic said that even though his city government had managed to save more than 400 million kuna (€53 million) so far, those savings had been used to “deal with new financial skeletons in the closet” that “had not been stated in the budget at all or had been stated, but with unrealistic amounts,” state agency Hina reported.

“Had we not filtered public procurement procedures and embarked on savings, our estimate is that budget expenditure by the end of the year would have increased by an additional half a billion kuna (€67 million),” he warned.