The leader received a denial from lawyers Ante Ćurković, Tomislav Ćurković, and Iljko Ćurić regarding the article published on April 26, 2013, which was taken from the Energetika-net portal under the title ‘Criminal charges filed against the “king of wind” Ante Ćurković’.
We are transmitting the denial in full:
In the aforementioned article, a series of inaccurate, untrue, and obviously malicious claims and insinuations were made to the detriment of our clients, regarding which, in the interest of publishing the truth and accurately informing the public, we request the publication of a correction of inaccurate and incomplete (very offensive) information and responses to the published information, in accordance with Articles 40-42 and Articles 56-58 of the Media Act (NN 59/04, 84/11).
First of all, we inform you that, after contacting MCI from Hamburg, the company referred to in your text, which is the immediate cause of other media reports on this case, we received official confirmation from MCI Hamburg that Mr. Michael Hermann (if he even exists) is not their authorized representative, that the same company does not deal with renewable energy sources, and that it has not filed any criminal charges against Mr. Ante Ćurković and his family members. Therefore, either in this specific case the author did not verify the basic claim from his article, or it is a commissioned article for the purpose of attacking Mr. Ante Ćurković and/or a similar illegal act, all of which implies criminal responsibility for the author and the involved parties. Regardless of the above, we firmly reject all insinuations made in the subject text about any illegal or immoral actions of any of our clients or their family members. The series of stated constructions is absurd, in addition to being untrue and extremely offensive. Namely, an average informed person in the field of renewable energy production is undoubtedly aware of the fact that reaching the stage of commercial operation of a wind farm requires obtaining at least fifteen approvals, consents, decisions, and resolutions from competent public authorities and concluding at least several contracts based on previous formal decisions, the prerequisite of which is resolving a number of property law issues. This is a lengthy and complex process that regularly takes years, which can be easily verified by reviewing the activity timeline that has been published for years on the Ministry of Economy’s website. Favoring any person or legal entity in the insinuated sense is not possible, nor is it logically feasible due to the complexity of the procedure for issuing all necessary approvals and would imply undue influence on the responsible persons of a number of bodies with public authority, namely the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the Ministry of Construction and Spatial Planning, the Ministry of Economy, the State Property Management Agency, the Croatian Energy Regulatory Agency (HERA), the Croatian Energy Market Operator Ltd. (HROTE), the HEP-Transmission System Operator Ltd. (HEP-OPS), the Croatian Electric Company Ltd. (HEP), county administrative departments for spatial planning, Croatian Forests, etc. It should be noted that the legal framework regulating the energy sector is aligned with all standards of EU legal acquis, which primarily insists on transparency.
The published claim about the possibility of favoritism through alleged influence on a number of public bodies in the highly regulated energy market is obviously untrue and simply absurd. We explicitly dispute that Mr. Ante Ćurković in any way (quote) “exploiting his position and authority ensured the obtaining of preliminary electricity consents (PEES) for wind farms in Croatia.” That the claim is untrue arises from the fact that PEES is issued by HEP-Transmission System Operator Ltd. (HEP-OPS), thus a separate legal entity with public authority in which Mr. Ante Ćurković has never been employed or engaged in any way, nor has he ever been superior to the same company, and therefore he did not have the authority to do anything for anyone’s alleged benefit. Furthermore, the position that Mr. Ante Ćurković held within HEP had nothing to do with the issuance of PEES, nor was any PEES for any project developed by companies associated with Mr. Ante Ćurković or his family members issued during the time (which, by the way, was very short) when Mr. Ante Ćurković was the director of the sector for strategy, investment planning, and corporate development at HEP d.d. In addition, the author of the text overlooked the easily accessible information that at this moment, PEES has been issued for wind farms in Croatia relating to more than 1,500 MW (of which companies associated with Mr. Ante Ćurković have obtained less than 14%) and that the preliminary consent, contrary to the stated claims, does not guarantee any exclusive right in terms of connection to the electricity grid after the construction of the wind farm, but a number of conditions (obtained in the procedures for location permits, etc.) must be met for each specific case to connect. In this sense, PEES is obviously not comparable to a concession or similar exclusive regime. Furthermore, PEES is a prerequisite for issuing a location permit and is one of the initial approvals on the long road to commercial operation status. To make the author’s thesis even more incredible, the author seems to be unaware of the PEES issuance procedure before 2012, according to which the issuance of PEES always required an official request from the body responsible for issuing the location permit, not the investor.
It is unnecessary to emphasize that for the commercial operation of a wind farm, all previous consents and approvals must be obtained, and that in this sense all approvals are equally relevant, from which it follows that the importance of PEES is overstated in the disputed text for the purpose of deliberately creating a false impression about our clients and presenting untrue insinuations. Croatian regulations in the field of renewable energy sources and all documents issued based on these regulations for the purpose of constructing renewable energy sources are transparently, clearly, and publicly published on the websites of the competent authorities (including the Ministry of Economy, HERA, HROTE, etc.). Since it is evident from previous publicly available sources that there are a large number of individuals/companies/investors engaged in the development of wind farms in the Republic of Croatia, at various stages of development, without any mention of the alleged investor MCI (which the author of the disputed text uses as a supposedly relevant source, although the link in the text itself refers to MCI – a company for television production and media services, which explicitly denies any connection to the case!), it is obvious that the claims in the text are unreliable. Also, from publicly available data, it follows that it is a common (and due to the method of project financing the only possible) situation that each individual wind farm project is located in a separate project company, as well as the fact that each investor develops multiple projects – precisely because of the high risk of development and project success, which makes it likely that only a smaller portion of the projects being developed will succeed.
