President of the Republic Attends 75th Anniversary of Liberation of Northwestern Croatia
The President of the Republic Zoran Milanović attended the 75th anniversary of the liberation of northwestern Croatia at Podgarić. He laid a wreath at the Monument to the Revolution of the People of Moslavina, and afterwards took part in a commemoration at which he addressed the participants.
“The current government shows a lot more understanding and tact regarding certain things than previous governments. Today, we are marking the 75th anniversary of one of the biggest victories over evil. One side chose the right way, the other the wrong way. Our side won the war and the country is founded on antifascism”, President Milanović said in his address.
He noted that antifascism had not been included in the Constitution by chance. “The Constitution is an act of political will and political awareness, and in 1990 there was no dilemma whatsoever whether antifascism should be incorporated into the Constitution. Antifascism is part of the Constitution, so negating it 30 years later is simply ridiculous”, the President of the Republic stated.
After the commemoration, the President of the Republic took questions from the press. Regarding the Janaf affair, he said that it is not clear to him why Janaf’s CEO Dragan Kovačević and businessman Krešo Petek were not arrested the instant the bribe of 1.96 million kunas was paid, after the police had recorded the circumstances of that event.
“I cannot understand why the action was not stopped as soon as surveillance showed that one individual was giving another individual two million kunas. That would have been the end of the story, you have a case, you have physical evidence. That is something I would be interested in”, President Milanović noted in Podgarić when asked about USKOK’s investigation into the alleged bid rigging in favour of businessman Krešo Petek’s company Elektrocentar Petek of Ivanić Grad.
“If the police actually had someone under surveillance who is carrying two million or 200 thousand kunas in order to bribe someone, then you arrest him at once and that’s the end of the story. Who were they waiting to arrest, the American President?”, President Milanović asked, adding that “this investigation is not clear”.
“It seems that he had been under surveillance for quite a while even at the time the other individual was allegedly handing over to him two million kunas. Why weren’t they all arrested together? That is the end of every investigation, you have a corpus delicti, you have it all. And so a lot of it isn’t clear to me”, President Milanović answered on the investigation into the Janaf affair.
The President also commented on Croatia having kept its credit rating at the investment level, saying that what Standard & Poor’s Agency said is good, however that these credit ratings by agencies are obsolete. “At a time when money is practically free, their forecast means nothing. What is more significant is what we know and what data are available to us, and next year should be a year of recovery and growth if the coronavirus situation eases”, President Milanović said.
PHOTO: Office of the President of the Republic of Croatia / Marko Beljan