"Within 30 days you will see 100 tenders for 100 projects ranging between HRK 500,000 and 2,000,000. By this summer they will multiply, and a tender for the EUR 800 million Plomin (power plant) project will be launched," Cacic said in an interview with Globus weekly magazine which hit the newsstands on Wednesday.

The minister said that large-scale projects were slow and that small-scale projects would be immediately launched.

Accordingly, a new atmosphere should be created in the country by the end of this year, said Cacic. "Something will begin to be done, and when there is work, people will start buying and spending," he explained.

Asked about his evaluation that it will be difficult to achieve the projected economic growth of 0.8% and what went wrong, Cacic answered that nothing went wrong and everything was going according to plan. "Once major investments get going, the economy will start to grow too, without the help of the minister," he said.

Speaking of the reasons for plans for his and Finance Minister Slavko Linic's appointment to the INA oil and gas group's supervisory board, Cacic said that Croatia's interests had been so far left unattended when it came to INA, in which Hungary's MOL holds a majority stake.

"The Hungarians can do with us what they want. When the Deputy Prime Minister and the Finance Minister enter the supervisory board, it will mean that the Croatian government sits on the board. (...) This must be so until things are settled in such a way that Croatia's state interests are protected," Cacic said.

As for Croatia's state-owned shipyards, Cacic said that they had cost Croatian taxpayers 20 billion kuna and would cost more due to state guarantees.

"There is no one who can pay that. It cannot go on this way any more, it cannot function like that any more," he said.

"The government must honour what it signed with the European Union. We have also set ourselves a task to preserve the shipbuilding industry as we believe that it is the last remaining complex and sophisticated product Croatia still has," the deputy premier said.

Asked whether there were some other potential investors in the shipbuilding industry, apart from businessman Danko Koncar and the DIV company, Cacic answered in the affirmative.

Asked how to avoid the worst-case scenario of shipyards not being privatised until Croatia's admission to the EU, which would mean that Croatia would have to pay back HRK 16 billion in state aid. Cacic said that in that event there would be considerable cuts, severance packages and lay-offs, "but no one would end up in the street."

"We will honour all legal standards, unfortunately, at the expense of the state," Cacic said,

Asked about his expectations from evaluations of Croatia's credit rating by another two agencies after Fitch has retained Croatia's current credit rating until further notice, the minister said he believed that all three CRAs could keep the current credit ratings for Croatia. "The confidence and good impression we have made are important," Cacic said.