It is equally bad if members of the Government voted for contracts with MOL without having important information or if they knew everything and participated in causing damage to national economic interests.
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Written by: Miodrag Šajatović |
If Jadranka Kosor and other ministers received the annexes to the contract on INA at the last moment, wouldn’t it have been simplest to request a one-day postponement of the decision? |
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There are days when even the greatest optimist feels there is no way out and that Michael Porter’s assessment, the world’s leading expert on competitiveness, will come true, that the citizens of Croatia will not awaken until they ‘crash into a concrete wall at full speed.’ Of course, we will collectively faint from that before we (perhaps) come to our senses. The trigger for acute extreme pessimism is the testimony of former Prime Minister Ivo Sanader before the parliamentary investigative committee examining the circumstances of INA’s privatization. It is unclear what is worse. If members of the Government, including current Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor, voted to sign the contract with MOL without knowing the most important details, then it is proof of how irresponsibly the members of the political elite of the ruling coalition make decisions. It is equally bad if they knew what damage they were causing to national economic interests and allowed it to happen with their votes. Hebrang’s Horror In both cases, such politicians should not remain in power. Especially since since Sanader’s departure from the prime minister’s position, almost every week one can observe amateurism in economic decision-making. Members of the Government’s cabinet continue to raise their hands for thoughtless, harmful decisions and laws. And thus they press the gas on a car that is about to crash into the wall that Professor Porter spoke about two years ago at the Lider conference. The arguments with which the president of the HDZ parliamentary club, Andrija Hebrang, tries to justify that the ruling party stood behind the unfavorable contract with the Hungarians regarding INA are horrific. Hebrang explains that ‘the HDZ Presidency did not have the annex to the shareholders’ agreement that it discussed and that the Government received the annex to the contract only on the day it discussed it.’ But couldn’t a person with an average intelligence quotient and a minimum of responsibility simply say: ‘I propose that the decision be postponed for 24 hours until I study the annex to the contract?’ But in the HDZ, it seems that no one thought of such a thing. The only benefit from the entire spectacle of the testimonies of Ivo Sanader, Polančec, and others could perhaps be that some other ministers (because there is no hope for these) in some other government, when a future prime minister forces them to vote on something they do not have enough information about, will not be obedient soldiers of the party (i.e., interest group), but responsible representatives of the party to which the citizens have entrusted to lead their common affairs. I say it could be, because it is not certain that politicians will learn a lesson from this. And it is even less certain that voters in the electoral market will punish those who easily ‘squander’ national wealth. Croatia and Kyrgyzstan In the case of the delivery of INA to foreign acquirers, it should also be said, it shows what it means when a state conducts privatization for 20 years without any previous government clearly determining what it actually wants to achieve through privatization. It has never been scientifically, and then politically, determined whether the goal of privatization is to fill the budget, more efficient management of companies, or social justice. So it is not surprising that it seems that the main interest of privatization all this time has been for individuals and groups to ‘scoop up’ as much wealth as possible for themselves. The people who turned their heads away from this deserve to be left without their ‘family silver.’ The reason for extreme pessimism this week is also that the pursuit of criminals in politics, whether political or criminal, has overshadowed all other processes in the country for months. Of course, crime must be dealt with, but there are those whose job it is. At the same time, efforts should be made to finally compile an economic recovery program that yields results. The existing one shows that it simply cannot respond to the complexity of the situation into which Croatia is rapidly sinking. If neither the comparison with Kyrgyzstan as a country that fails to emerge from recession when everyone else has succeeded, nor the fact that Croatia is among the 20 countries most exposed to the risk of default (cessation of debt payments to foreign creditors) can awaken the Government from its hypnotic state, then a responsible individual must indeed feel – fear. |
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