Prime Minister Andrej Plenković stated today that the most important thing is that Fortenova functions well and that it needs to be determined whether the transaction for the sale of Sberbank’s stake is legal.
– I will repeat a few points: the first and most important is that the company functions and functions well. If it had not been for the government’s intervention five and a half years ago when the company was collapsing, we would have experienced a collapse of both family farms and suppliers, and we would have lost jobs in a number of companies within the then Agrokor system – said the Prime Minister.
According to him, Croatia, during the adoption of the relevant regulation at the EU Council level, secured an exception to leave a time frame until October 31 for Sberbank, which has been announcing and communicating for a long time that it wants to sell its stake, to have time to do so, and the Croatian government provided all approvals in a timely manner.
In the end, it happened that within one fund, a part of the co-owners in that fund decided not to participate in that transaction, and that transaction was not realized, the Prime Minister said.
– When we sum up all the information, we will see who it is, whether the transaction is legal, whether the actual investor is the gentleman who is intensively appearing in the media, as far as I can see, along with a PR agency. We need to look very carefully at what is going on before we make decisions. The most important thing for us is that the company functions normally and that everything within its structure operates – he emphasized.
When asked whether the investor had already contacted the Government, Plenković replied that he had read about the request for a meeting. When asked whether the Security and Intelligence Agency (SOA) had knowledge of the transaction, the Prime Minister briefly told reporters to ask SOA about that.
