Six years after the investigation into the Brodosplit affair was opened, the trial for economic crime has finally begun at the County Court in Split.
Namely, by entering into detrimental contracts with the German company Wessels for the construction of four tankers, Brodosplit was damaged by nearly 5 million dollars, for which broker Drago Maček, former directors of the Split shipyard Goran Vukasović and Ante Luetić, current director of Brodotrogir Mateo Tramontana, and four other individuals are on the defendant’s bench. This morning, all of them stated that they do not feel guilty. More than 50 witnesses will be examined during the proceedings.
The Brodosplit affair was uncovered in 2006 when a warning about money laundering in Brodosplit arrived from Austria. The then management of Brodosplit agreed with Wessels, which ordered four tankers, on a deal at a price of 51.5 million dollars per tanker, but Vukasović signed additional letters returning 1.9 percent of the contracted price to the client as a commission. When the client Wessels paid five million dollars in advance, Brodosplit returned 4.7 million dollars to the client’s Cypriot accounts.
The money was transferred to an account of a company in Graz, Austria, where the only authorized person was the first defendant Drago Maček, who withdrew the money and transferred it to the accounts of the other defendants for money laundering. Tramontana, Donkov, Matovinović, Nikolić, and Cesarac received this money, as stated in the indictment, in Austria. In addition to their own and private accounts, Maček also paid 200,000 euros to the account of a Dutch company owned by a German citizen and about 311,000 dollars to the account of an American company owned by a British citizen.
