Horvat: Maras left 45 million kuna in debt. Maras: This is a spin, diverting public attention from the dismissal of Lozančić

The Minister of Entrepreneurship and Crafts, Darko Horvat, stated on Monday that former minister Gordan Maras left him with 45 million kuna in obligations from last year. Of course, the former minister immediately responded.

Minister Horvat conveyed that these obligations will have to be settled from this year’s budget, which could pose a problem for him considering that the total annual budget of the Ministry is 200 million kuna.

– Therefore, around 45 million kuna in assumed obligations from 2015 will have to be transferred to 2016, Horvat stated.

When asked if he received any logical argument as to why this money was not paid last year, he said that part of these obligations can be justified by the nature of the projects that were implemented.  He explained that in the case of subsidizing interest for loans, which last three or four years, it is logical that this interest subsidy is spread over several years, i.e., for the duration of that loan arrangement. 

However, on the other hand, he cites the example of the Entrepreneurial Impulse for last year.

– When the Entrepreneurial Impulse was implemented in 2015, when contracts were signed and when the Entrepreneurial Impulse received the green light from the Government – at the moment when the budget was defined in 2015, at that moment funds were reserved in the state budget for 2015 from which the Entrepreneurial Impulse was implemented, he said.

He emphasized that the problem is not how many contracts were signed but why the financial obligations under those contracts were not paid in 2015, “but rather more than 10 million kuna is being transferred to the budget that we will only start to compile for 2016.”

When asked if these obligations pose a problem for him, he replied: – If the Ministry’s budget is somewhere around 200 million kuna, and there are already defined 45 million, you can conclude for yourself.

He clarified that these 45 million kuna relate to five different projects, none of which have been completed.

– At the moment I took over the ministry, it was classified in the handover record that these are ongoing projects, he emphasized.

Of course, his colleague, former SDP Minister of Entrepreneurship and Crafts Gordan Maras, dismissed the accusations of his successor Darko Horvat that he left debts in the Ministry amounting to almost a quarter of the budget, the media reports.

– In the handover record from the first second he entered the Ministry, he received full information about what he is talking about today, he has known this for two weeks, Maras said and assessed that Horvat’s statement is “an attempt at spin, to divert public attention from the dismissal of the director of SOA, Dragan Lozančić.”

The claim that the Ministry had to pay all obligations last year is incorrect because, he says, that was not technically possible.

– Nothing is unknown, everything is known, if the new minister had only talked to the professional services, it would have been clear to him that this is a continuous job that started before. Until 2025, interest on entrepreneurial loans will be subsidized, Maras said.