A former chairman of the INA oil company's managing board, Tomislav Dragicevic, has dismissed former Deputy Prime Minister Damir Polancec's statement to a parliamentary commission investigating INA's privatisation that Dragicevic participated in the privatisation of INA as its CEO and that as "an untouchable political protégé of Stjepan Mesic", he left the company in debts.
In an interview in a late night news broadcast on Croatian Television on Tuesday, Dragicevic said that INA's management did not participate in the company's privatisation either in 2003 or in 2009, when the shareholders' agreement between the government and the Hungarian oil company MOL was amended.
He said that he knew nothing of a possible political background of the privatisation or trade-offs in the transfer of management rights to MOL.
As for the criticism that he left the company with huge losses, including a debt to the state, and that he did not modernise its refineries, Dragicevic said that after its consolidation in 2001 INA was continually making profits of some US$100 million until the beginning of the economic crisis in late 2008.
He said that INA today was a successful company that paid close to US$700 million in the state budget monthly.
The positive developments are owing to a new approach that was taken when (Finance Minister) Ivan Suker was appointed chairman of the Supervisory Board, said Dragicevic, now a member of INA's Management Board.
Commenting on Polancec's statement that he was Mesic's political protégé, Dragicevic said that it should be viewed as a situation when "somebody wants to save themselves".
Dragicevic also dismissed Polancec's claim that he and Dragicevic went to the President's Office for talks on INA's privatisation, saying that "Polancec has mixed something up".
We were together at the President's Office maybe once, to discuss additional gas imports, Dragicevic said.
He added that he had not met with former Prime Minister Ivo Sanader to discuss INA's privatisation either.
"I don't know why anyone would say something like this, everything can be checked easily, there are records about who visited the government headquarters or the President's Office and how often," the former INA CEO said.
Former President Stjepan Mesic, too, on Tuesday night commented on Polancec's claims, dismissing them as "blatant lies".
"Damir Polancec never came to me with any information on the sale of INA or the sale of INA's management rights to MOL. That is a blatant lie," Mesic said.
When asked why then Polancec was mentioning him in that context, Mesic said that Polancec obviously believed that he would "improve his own position by implicating as many people as possible".
