The Croatian Competition Agency (AZTN) said in a statement on Sunday it had not acted illegally in assessing the INA-MOL concentration, stressing that the assessment had been made in accordance with the Competition Act by a team of legal and economic experts.
The statement was prompted by "inaccuracies given by an Agency employee in her testimony in the trial of former Prime Minister Ivo Sanader".
The AZTN said it had notified the prime minister and the deputy prime minister and economy minister in April 2009 about its findings, saying that the Hungarian oil group MOL was taking over INA. The AZTN's analysis contained a preliminary assessment of the impact of such concentration on competition in Croatia, especially on the retail and wholesale market.
The agency said that its analysis also contained a list of possible measures to remove the negative effects of the concentration. In its notification, the AZTN made it clear to the prime minister and the deputy prime minister that "the concentration cannot be approved under the so-called shortened procedure, but an in-depth analysis of its effects on competition must be made."
The letter was hand delivered to the Cabinet and the Economy Ministry by an AZTN driver and was not immediately entered in the agency's newly-installed electronic filing system. The evidence of how the letter came to be written and delivered has been presented to the State Prosecutor's Office, the AZTN said.
In her testimony given before the Zagreb County Court on April 27, AZTN employee Vesna Spoljaric said that Petra Petrovic, the secretary to AZTN chief Olgica Spevec, had asked her in December 2009 to backdate the letter, which allegedly warned Sanader that by changing the shareholders' agreement MOL would gain a dominant position on the market, to April 2009. The witness said that the secretary then went to another colleague and asked her to open a new file to register the letter.
The AZTN said that this was "a malicious interpretation of communication in the registry office," because Spoljaric had not notified any of her superiors about it, but had made a note of it in her personal diary.
The AZTN said that it was the only institution that had been pointing out since March 2009 that MOL had taken over INA. It recalled the latest monitoring report by the European Commission which favourably assessed its work regarding the implementation of competition rules.
