Former Economy Minister Martina Dalic presented her book Agrokor: Slom ortačkog kapitalizma (“Agrokor: The Collapse of Crony Capitalism”) in Zagreb on Monday. The book details the process of drafting the controversial bill on state-appointed crisis management, dubbed Lex Agrokor, in 2017, after a crisis emerged in the Agrokor food and retail group.
Attending the Monday launch at the National and University Library in Zagreb were many prominent politicians, including Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic and several ministers, as well as business people, unionists, and lawyers, who participated in drafting the bill.
The Croatian Parliament had passed Lex Agrokor on April 6, 2017, allowing the government to intervene and appoint crisis managers at companies deemed large enough to be “systemically important” for the economy at large.
Before the crisis began in Agrokor, the company employed some 60,000 people in dozens of its subsidiaries across the region, with its annual revenue at around €7 billion, or almost 15 percent of Croatia’s GDP.
Dalic said she wrote the book in order to explain what was happening when the government was faced with the crisis in the privately-owned conglomerate.
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“There were countless lies in the public sphere, spread by those who wanted to see the emergency administration process to fail,” she said at the launch.
Lex Agrokor was heavily criticised in Croatia by experts who claimed it was a violation of the principles of the free market and equal treatment of all companies, enshrined in the Constitution.
The Constitutional Court had ruled the law was in line with the Constitution in May this year, dismissing proposals lodged by 12 different applicants who had requested the court examine specific provisions of the law.
Dalic had resigned later in May, over the so-called Hotmail affair, when e-mails of experts from the private sector, who had drafted the bill without public knowledge, were leaked and published by Index.hr website.
After the emails were leaked, doubts were raised about possible conflict of interest as some of the people involved in drafting the bill may have profited from its implementation, either by passing on privileged information or by later getting hired as consultants by the company’s state-appointed management.
In her announcement, Dalic had said that the scandal had made her to be seen as a burden to the government and her party.
Last Tuesday, N1 published two previously unseen e-mails, exchanged between Dalic and finance consultant Branimir Bricelj from the Altera Corporate Finance consulting company, who was part of the mailing group which had worked on drafting the bill.
The e-mails seem to indicate that members of the group made adjustments to the Lex Agrokor before it was sent to parliament, designed to benefit Knighthead, a hedge fund they secretly held meetings with. The changes appear to have been designed to help Knighthead make huge profits by buying bonds at rock-bottom prices, and claiming at full nominal prices, while all other creditors of Agrokor had to incur massive losses through write-offs.
However, Dalic said on Monday that there had been no intention of conspiracy or corruption in dealing with the crisis in the ailing conglomerate.
“I resigned over events that never happened. There was no secret group, but the government’s stability was shaken because of emails that appeared in the public sphere. Although it was a set-up, the Prime Minister and I agreed that I should resign, although I’m not guilty of what I’m being accused of,” she said.
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