The Municipal Court in Split today provisionally sentenced the director of the construction company Konstruktor-Inženjering to six months in prison with a two-year probation period for forging a document with which, according to the indictment, he attempted to prove that Slobodna Dalmacija had defamed him with its writing and thereby harmed the company, for which he sought compensation of 1.7 billion kuna.
In December 2005, Žderić filed a lawsuit against the Split daily newspaper at the Municipal Court in Split for damages and, according to the allegations from the indictment of the Municipal State Attorney’s Office, attached a forged letter in which it was falsely stated that he lost a major job in Libya due to the writing of Slobodna Dalmacija.
The alleged letter from the Libyan Supreme Council for Transport, which was established in court proceedings to have been forged by Žderić, stated that the Constructor’s bid submitted for the construction of a road in Libya was rejected due to an article published in the Split press in which Žderić was accused of malpractices related to the privatization of that company.
In his media appearances in 2007, Žderić claimed that, due to the article in Slobodna Dalmacija, Constructor lost a job in Libya worth 1.5 billion euros and that he was seeking compensation of ten percent in the court proceedings, which amounts to about 1.7 billion kuna.
This is Žderić’s second provisional six-month prison sentence. In June 2012, also at the Split Municipal Court, he was provisionally sentenced to six months in prison for participating in the illegal privatization of Constructor.
