From the position of the head of HUP, the new CEO Davor Majetić intends to seriously oppose the anti-business climate, bring trade unions to the table, develop social dialogue, and improve Croatia’s dangerously compromised competitiveness.
This, he asserted to journalists after his first five working days in the new role, will be his top priorities. Only investments can pull Croatia out, and they are hindered by bureaucracy, the complexity of investments, the passing of responsibility between local and public authorities, and it does not help that some laws have not changed for decades, claims Majetić. Damir Kuštrak, president of HUP, suggests that at least for large investments, a ruling should be made on whether they can be realized or not. He considers the initiative to designate a specific person in the government who would communicate with investors in the future to be a good one. The difficulty investors currently face in navigating Croatian regulations, bureaucracy, and the sluggishness of the system is evidenced by concrete examples. For instance, one investor could not obtain a calculation of gas prices for the future period, another could not find out the price of converting agricultural land to construction land within the construction zone, while no one could explain to an American investor why he would have to build a transformer station just because he would be purchasing HEP’s electricity. As an additional burden, Kuštrak points out that there are even 940 new regulations, laws, and rules enacted in the last two years. Every such investor will surely turn their back on Croatia. Majetić believes that there is also a significant problem in labor rights, especially in a crisis, and emphasizes that without dialogue and communication, there will be no way out of the crisis. As he states, trade unions representing public and state services should be separated from those representing the private sector in the GSV, as they do not have the same interests or negotiating positions. (G.G.)
