Do you know who Benjamin Lakatos is? Although his name is almost unknown in Croatia outside the circle of energy professionals, Lakatos is at the beginning of the ownership chain at the Croatian end of which is the company MET Croatia Energy Trade, the sixth largest by revenue in Croatia in 2023. The Court Register records that the sole owner of MET Croatia is the company MET Sales and Trading Holding from Switzerland, and it is quite easy to reconstruct that this ownership chain leads to Lakatos, a Hungarian citizen who founded the MET Group in Switzerland in 2007, a trader in gas and electricity, of which he is today the general director and majority owner.
In an attempt to determine who the real owners of the hundred largest Croatian companies are, however, we have not been as fortunate in all cases as with Lakatos, so we must emphasize in advance that we cannot guarantee that our table listing the owners is absolutely accurate. However, we guarantee that in unraveling ownership chains, it is as accurate as possible based on publicly available data.
Vujnovac as half the state
The hundred largest Croatian companies generated a little over 50 billion euros in revenue last year, with around 14.4 billion euros contributed by as many as 14 companies that are wholly or predominantly owned by the Republic of Croatia. In most of these companies, the state is the sole owner. After the Republic of Croatia, the owner of the most companies on the list of the hundred largest is Pavao Vujnovac. Under his direct ownership control, there are as many as seven companies. The largest among them is Prvo plinarsko društvo (PPD), the third largest by revenue last year, nominally owned by the company Blue Horizon from Vukovar, of which Vujnovac is the sole owner.
In Vujnovac’s majority ownership, or his company Sustainable Solutions Holding based in Switzerland, is the company ENNA Next, and four more companies from the list of the hundred largest (Konzum plus, PIK Vrbovec plus, Tisak plus, and Jamnica plus) are owned by Vujnovac based on his majority ownership (70 percent) of the company Open Pass Limited from Malta, through which he acquired a 93.78 percent ownership stake in the Fortenova Group, the sole owner of the mentioned companies.
Apart from Vujnovac’s PPD, there are only nine sole owners of companies they founded themselves. Mile Ćurković is the sole owner of Plodine, Branko Roglić is the sole owner of Orbico, Tommy is wholly owned by Tomislav Mamić, Kamgrad by Dragutin Kamenski, M SAN by Stipe Matić, and the owner of AGS Croatia is Miroslav Antunović. Petar Pripuz is the sole owner of the company CE-ZA-R, or the C.I.O.S. group of which CE-ZA-R is a subsidiary. We conclude the list of companies that are wholly owned by one person with Jasenko Joukhadar, the owner of Medical Intertrade, and Georg Gavrilović, the owner of Globalna hrana, the franchise holder for McDonald’s in Croatia.
Hidden ownership structures
One of the biggest mysteries in ownership chains is who is the individual with the greatest ownership influence in Tankerska plovidba. This information is carefully hidden in a complex ownership structure built to avoid a situation where an unwanted acquirer of the company might emerge. Nominally, the majority owner (95.73 percent) of Tankerska plovidba is a company called Tankerska Holding, which is based in Austria. The sole owner of that company is a foundation called Betriebsstiftung Tankerska Plovidba d.d. Privatstiftung, also registered in Austria. The ultimate beneficiaries of that foundation are the employees of Tankerska plovidba and sailors with more than a year and a half of sailing on the company’s ships. According to the foundation’s rules, ownership shares are not allocated to individuals, but the beneficiaries of the foundation are collective owners.
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