European court rejects MOL CEO Zsolt Hernadi's lawsuit against Croatia

NEWS 26.09.201913:16
ATTILA KISBENEDEK / AFP

The European Court of Human Rights on Thursday rejected an application by Hungarian oil group MOL chief executive officer Zsolt Hernadi who had sued Croatia for issuing a European warrant for his arrest after a Croatian court decided that he should be remanded in custody on the suspicion that he had bribed former Croatian prime minister Ivo Sanader.

The Strasbourg-based court decided that the application is inadmissible and its decision final.

The court held that the applicant had not properly raised his complaint before the Constitutional Court and had therefore not exhausted the domestic remedies and that he did not present valid arguments for his allegation that his right to free movement had been violated.

Hernadi had sued Croatia for violating his right to free movement, which is protected under one of the protocols to the European Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The MOL CEO said in his application that his freedom of movement, including the right to leave his own country, was restricted because he was concerned that he could be arrested and handed over to Croatia.

In April 2017 Hernadi’s Croatian attorney Laura Valkovic said that her client had reported Croatia to the European Court of Human Rights because it was using “criminal law and criminal proceedings in an imagined game of chess” in which he “did not want to participate.”

Hernadi is being tried in his absence by the Zagreb County Court along with Sanader on the charges that he was supposed to pay Sanader EUR 10 million in bribes through an intermediary in exchange for MOL taking over management rights in the Croatian oil company INA.