Former Prime Minister Ivo Sanader on Thursday pleaded not guilty to all counts in the recently joined indictment charging him with war profiteering in the Hypo bank loan case and taking 10 million euros in bribes to secure a dominant position for the Hungarian oil company MOL in Croatia's INA.
I'm not guilty," Sanader told a panel of Zagreb County Court judges presided over by Ivan Turudic.
Sanader allegedly took a commission of 3.6 million kuna from the Austrian Hypo bank to facilitate a loan to Croatia during the war in the 1990s. This is now the first count in the joined indictment, while the taking of bribes from MOL is the second.
The indictment, which was read out by prosecutor Tamara Laptos, says that for the 10 million euros in bribes from MOL Sanader was also supposed to have arranged the divestment of INA's loss-making natural gas business to the Croatian government. The prosecution proposed that if found guilty Sanader pay back the 10 million euros to the government.
Speaking of the second count of the indictment, Sanader's attorney Cedo Prodanovic said that it was issued although the investigation was not completed, adding that the only evidence against Sanader was a statement by the owner of the petrochemical company DIOKI and the newspaper Novi List, Robert Jezic, through whose companies a portion of the bribe had been allegedly paid to Sanader, and that the prosecution had not interviewed any witnesses whose testimony would be in his client's favour.
The defence claimed that the prosecution had failed to prove that the agreement between the government and MOL was detrimental to Croatia.
Prodanovic repeated that all core members of the Cabinet, the Presidency of the ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party and its coalition partners had given their consent for the signing of allegedly harmful deals with MOL.
