Voice of Entrepreneurs: It is unacceptable for HZZ support to be limited to THREE activities!

Prime Minister Plenković announced that measures for job preservation after May will be limited only to tourism, hospitality, and transport, which the Voice of Entrepreneurs association considers discriminatory. Furthermore, UGP demands transparency in the spending of non-repayable funds that Croatia received from the European Union, which were supposed to be allocated for job preservation measures, according to the statement. 

The Voice of Entrepreneurs association believes it is unacceptable for economic measures after May to be limited to only three activities: tourism, hospitality, and transport, as announced yesterday by the Prime Minister of the Republic of Croatia, Andrej Plenković. We agree that these are the most vulnerable sectors, which we have emphasized since the beginning of the crisis, but many other sectors remain deprived. We immediately reacted with a letter to the ministries with which we have a scheduled meeting on Thursday, namely the Ministry of Tourism, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of the Sea, Transport and Infrastructure.

“We believe this is a matter of discrimination because there are still many sectors that have no income, such as the event industry, seasonal trade businesses that operate at fairs, and other related activities.“ wrote Dražen Oreščanin, Executive Director of the Voice of Entrepreneurs association in a letter to the ministries, seeking confirmation that the criteria for measures will continue to be a 50% drop in revenue without limitation to only the three mentioned industries, as the State Secretary of the Ministry of Finance stated at last week’s meeting between UGP and the involved ministries. If conditions need to be further tightened, it is possible to raise the threshold to a 60% or 70% drop in revenue – but fairly and equally for all affected companies. 

The event industry is inextricably linked to tourism, and it is unnecessary to mention how severely it has been affected by the COVID-19 crisis from the very beginning. Only this week, after exceptional efforts by the Events Committee of the Voice of Entrepreneurs association, gatherings of up to 300 people outdoors have been allowed, which is just a small step towards their revival. They will no longer be able to seek job preservation measures, which is existentially devastating for 12,000 people.

“I want to emphasize that such a move would be catastrophic and would represent unprecedented market discrimination against all other sectors and thousands of companies that have been directly prevented from operating by the Government’s decision and are now on the brink of collapse. Let us take the event industry as an example, along with numerous companies such as audio and video equipment rental companies, organizers of various events, ticket sales companies, conference organizers, companies that rent halls, and many others that are still unable to operate and have already lost over 50% of their annual revenue due to the blockade in the most profitable months. According to this Government proposal, all these companies, over 2,000 with more than 12,000 employees – are evidently less valuable than, for example, travel agencies, deserve to fail, and their employees deserve to be unemployed.“ said Berislav Marszalek from the Events Committee of the Voice of Entrepreneurs association.

When we talk about job preservation measures, another question arises that we posed in the same letter to the ministries.

On March 26, it was announced that Croatia would receive a grant (i.e., non-repayable funds, not a loan) from EU funds amounting to 1.16 billion euros, or about 8.8 billion kuna for economic assistance. According to our understanding and communication we had with government representatives, these are funds used to cover the costs of minimum wage measures. We can estimate that a maximum of 6 billion kuna will be spent over three months, which means that from these funds, Croatia still has 2.8 billion kuna available.

Therefore, we requested confirmation from the Ministry of Finance that these are funds used for the minimum wage measure, and if not, an explanation of why that is the case and what these funds are being spent on if not for the economic assistance measure for which they were originally intended.

There remains the question of why not all entrepreneurs have yet received the funds for job preservation that were supposed to be paid by the 15th of this month, about which we also requested a statement from the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Labor. We requested the publication of a new, updated list for April of all those who have received subsidies with the date of subsidy payment, to ensure transparency and clarify the entire situation. We also requested that the list transparently include companies that applied to enter the April measure but whose requests were not approved, along with the reasons for the rejection of their requests.

We note that if discrimination against certain sectors does not cease, we will continue with protest activities, they conclude in the statement. 

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