The fate of Croatia’s largest privately-owned company should be known in the next few days.
According to media reports, Agrokor has reached a standstill agreement with creditors, under which the entire board of directors will be dismissed on Monday, and the new board will not have any Croatian representatives, reports N1 on March 31, 2017.
Standstill agreement means that creditors will not do anything to force payment of money owed to them during the precisely defined process of restructuring. During the validity of the standstill agreement, owners will lose part or even all of their ownership rights. Although details of the agreement are not yet known, according to one version of events it includes the dismissal of the entire board of directors of Agrokor and appointment of the new one, which will have no Croatian members.
The creditors have reached an agreement without the government, which yesterday late at night reached its own agreement among coalition partners on the law on systemically important companies. It is expected that the government will adopt the law on Friday afternoon and then send it to emergency parliamentary procedure. “The law will be adopted, we have discuss it, the key is to protect the national economic system and jobs”, said Speaker of Parliament Božo Petrov, who is also head of MOST, one of the two major parties of the ruling coalition.
“We are not doing this for the sake Agrokor’s majority owner Ivica Todorić, but in order to protect the national economic system and jobs. We cannot allow any company in Croatia to jeopardize the economic system, because that could lead to a recession”, he said.
The pressure increased on Thursday on all sides – Agrokor, creditors and the government – after it was announced that Orbico, one of Agrokor’s suppliers, decided to force Agrokor to repay money owed to it. Some of the other smaller creditors followed the lead and by the end of Thursday about a hundred million kuna of debt was in the process of forcible collection.
Interestingly, Petrov on Thursday evening submitted a criminal complaint against the management of Agrokor, led by Todorić, after one of the leaders of the Russian VTB bank said on Wednesday that Agrokor had falsified its financial statements. On Thursday, the Russian bank changed somewhat its position and said that there were only some irregularities contained in the financial reports.
Former Deputy Prime Minister in previous government Radimir Čačić called Petrov’s decision to file the criminal complaint “pathetic” and said that it was just a way for Petrov to collect a few votes.
