Novmeber 23, 2022 - The full transcript of last week's court case between the Croatian National Tourist Board and TCN CEO Paul Bradbury.
There is a small, but growing trend in my LinkedIn inbox - messages from lawyers, international lawyers. No, I am not in trouble again, but it seems that my ongoing lawsuits with the Croatian National Tourist Board, which I am documenting in Diary of a Croatian Lawsuit, are being followed by international legal entities, who are finding the whole process rather fascinating. Here is one such email from a couple of days ago:
- Hello. As a lawyer working for the Council of Europe, I enjoy following your coverage of your court case.
You can read the latest report on last week's court appearance in Diary of a Croatian Lawsuit: Irish Newspapers and Belgian Radio, but below please find the whole transcript of the hearing, ably translated by Lauren Simmonds.
Business number: 64 Pn-2010/20-22 - The minutes from 17.11.2022 during the main hearing held at the Municipal Civil Court in Zagreb
Those present from the court: Ela Misura Stopfer (judge), Renata Loncar (minute taker)
Plaintiff: Croatian National Tourist Board (HTZ/CNTB)
Defendant: Paul David Raymond Bradbury
Subject at hand: Damages
The judge starts the main discussion at 09:00 and announces the subject of the discussion.
The discussion is public.
It has been established that the following are present:
For the plaintiff: Zoran Vukic, lawyer (with power of attorney)
For the defendant: Vanja Juric, lawyer (with power of attorney)
It has been established that witnesses Kresimir Macan, the identity of whom was determined by inspection of his ID card, and Zoran Pejovic, the identity of whom was determined by inspection of his residence permit were present.
It has been noted that Dora Nikolla also joined as a court interpreter, who submitted a copy of the decision on their appointment to the file, and submitted the original for inspection.
The plaintiff presents as in the lawsuit, they stand by their [previous] claim and all previous allegations.
The defendant stands by their answer to the lawsuit and all previous allegations.
The court is set to determine: A solution
Evidence will be presented by hearing [the testimonies of the] witnesses who have appeared.
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Witness: Kresimir Macan
My profession involves communications in general, and I have been known to forward information related to tourism to the defendant. I have read the article in question and I remember it as well as I possibly could with regard to the passage of time [since then]. This is the period in which Croatia suddenly opened up to tourism after the coronavirus [pandemic]. They did not want to communicate this clearly, I guess it was because of Croatia then holding the [rotating] presidency of the European Union (EU). However, word got out and people started making inquiries. It is true that at that time, tourism in the Republic of Croatia was advertised to certain, but not all, markets, and that the focus was on destinations to which people could travel by car/road. The defendant criticised the above, considering that some other markets could have also been taken into account, which I consider to be logical. It is also true that there were signs in the Irish media that citizens of that country could not come to the Republic of Croatia, and in general there were quite a lot of confusing publications in foreign media. I believe that the confusion occurred due to the time lag between the moment when we (Croatia) opened up to tourism and the moment when the CNTB started to communicate this to the outside world.
To answer the question put forth by the lawyer of the plaintiff, I state that the CNTB announced that it was carrying out targeted activities towards these markets, and if it had communicated regularly, I would not be testifying here today. During that period, I was involved with the [topic of] coronavirus, and at that time I was not yet involved with tourism.
When asked whether I knew that on June the 12th, 2020 the CNTB's campaign was already underway, I state that I do not know. I know that such publications could be found in the Irish media, but now I don't remember exactly which media it was, everything is on the portal. There were more [such] publications, but I don't remember the exact number.
In response to the question of whether the CNTB commented on such publications in foreign media, I state that the defendant corrected all these statements since he was receiving questions and providing answers to them, and the CNTB was not doing its job proactively at that time. I know this fact because I personally received inquiries and Paul told me that he [also] received a lot of inquiries on this topic, even though I was involved with coronavirus at that time, I also started becoming involved with tourism when Croatia started losing money.
From the 19th of May, 2020, you could not get any information from the CNTB, the only information [available] was provided by the Ministry of the Interior (MUP) and the defendant. I have known the defendant for ten years. I sometimes have business cooperation with him. I do not know whether or not the defendant would offer commercial business cooperation in 2020 to the plaintiff. At that time, I did not offer the plaintiff any business cooperation, but the plaintiff falsely accused us and spread gossip that we had indeed asked for it (in reference to business cooperations).
I do not know whether the defendant had any business cooperation with the plaintiff before that. Foreign tourists addressed the defendant with questions because he was the main source of information in English, he systematically published information about the conditions of arrival and stay in the Republic of Croatia during the pandemic and, as a private entrepreneur, he was more rapid in terms of communication. I don't know what the share of Irish and English tourists is in the Croatian market. I don't know how they got here, I know that they came to Dubrovnik by plane. Nobody was flying then because of coronavirus.
In response to the question put forth by the defandant's lawyer, I state to the that there was no Viber (platform) community for tourism at that time, while there was such a community related to information related to the coronavirus, and it was an official state one. Later, my agency did one at the request of Paul, who was getting a lot of inquiries and was no longer able to answer them all. This happened because no one, with the exception of MUP, responded to any inquiries via e-mail, and due to the large number of inquiries, we opened such a community, which was later visited by 220,000 people. We had to come up with our own material because there was no official material to use. That viber community was founded on Tuesday, May the 21st, 2020.
In response to the question put forth by the plaintiff's lawyer, I state that the Viber channel was offered to the Ministry of Tourism (CNTB) for free, it was not offered for sale, and it was offered to them because business had expanded so much that we could no longer do it all alone. We did not have a conversation with the CNTB about that Viber channel, the minister claimed he would get back to us.
I have nothing more to say, there are no more questions.
Witness: Zoran Pejovic
I know what is written in the article in question, my statements were also published in it, and I know what Paul stated and published in that article, and I believe that it is all correct. Namely, I was opening a hotel on Hvar at the time, and inquiries were constantly coming from tourists and journalists, because no one knew whether it was possible to come to Croatia or not, all because of the pandemic. I believe that it is very necessary to communicate this information to the public and to foreign tourists and travel agencies, because there was uncertainty. At that time, I cooperated with the defendant via his portal Total Croatia News in such a way that I wrote information, and he mostly corrected the incorrect publications coming out in foreign media. Namely, we wanted the tourism market in Croatia to continue despite the pandemic, and for it to remain in people's memory so that when the market opens, they have that (the Croatian) market in mind.
In response to the question put forth by the plaintiff's lawyer, I state that I have been working with the plaintiff for about 10 years, that is, we have known each other for that long. He certainly did not pay me for any business services, and it is possible that we did some promotion through social media. I don't know how many times it was published in foreign media that citizens of Ireland and Belgium were unable to travel to the Republic of Croatia. I don't know how many Irish and Belgian tourists came to the Republic of Croatia before 2020. I know that these are airline destinations. I don't know if there were flights from those countries to Croatia from April onwards in 2020. I don't know in what percentage the success of the Croatian tourist market was measured in during the 2020 [tourist] season in regards to its rank in comparison to other competitive tourist countries.
To the specific question of whether the defendant worked within the tourism sector, I state that he worked as a tourist journalist, which in my opinion is in the tourism sector. I don't know how long he has been writing about tourism. As far as I know, he has been writing about tourism for 10 years. I don't know how many followers he has.
In response to the question put forth by the plaintiff's lawyer, I state that my statements have been faithfully transmitted in the article in question. When I said that there is no organised work on promotion and that promotion should be done more strongly, I was referring to the fact that tourist boards in countries mostly engage in destination marketing in tourism. I didn't rely too much on the work of the tourist boards, but since in this situation the state was the one that passed certain bans (coronavirus restrictions), I was of the belief that the CNTB should have been the one to communicate it, which did not happen. The plaintiff did not file a lawsuit against me. They neither asked me to publish any corrections nor withdraw my statement.
In response to the question put forth by the plaintiff's lawyer, I state that the target markets for 2020 were Belgium and Ireland, but by the 13th of May 2020, Croatia could not be reached by plane from those countries, and I do not know exactly when the flights began running again. I don't know if it was possible to come to Croatia by car, I don't think it was possible to cross the border.
I have nothing more to say, there are no more questions.
Evidence will be presented by a hearing of the defendant - Defendant: Paul David Raymond Bradbury
The first case of coronavirus in Croatia appeared in March 2020, and my portal Total Croatia News had written about coronavirus two months before that. In March, we already had a map showcasing the possibilities of entering and travelling to Croatia, and since March we had daily reports with all the necessary information, and we were the first portal in Croatia that informed [people] about this information.
Even on the 7th of May, 2020, the Ministry of Tourism didn't have any information about the possibility of movement and the possibility of travelling to the Republic of Croatia, although all other countries already had such information [on offer to the public], Croatia was the only country in the world that did not have it. It was impossible to deliver information to foreign tourists, even on the website of the CNTB, one piece - and a weak piece at that - of information was published with reference to a Narodne Novine (Official Gazette) number.
I wrote an article about it and just two days after the publication of that article we had a lot more information about it being offered on the websites of the CNTB and the [Tourism] Ministry. During those two months of the absence of such information, everyone asked us for information, and my mailbox/inbox was full, and we were in charge of providing information to such an extent that CNN published my website on its list of links for obtaining information for each country. For other countries, the official websites for their tourist boards were linked.
On May the 13th, 2020, the Republic of Croatia opened up [its borders] a bit, but it was not yet known who could come here and how, and on May the 15th, 2020, Kresimir Macan called me and said we should go to the Croatian border and see the situation on the spot so that we could publish the information. Chaos greeted us at the border and we saw two Slovenian citizens who wanted to go to the Adriatic, but since they did not have a certificate of accommodation, their entry into Croatia was forbidden. At that time, we worked closely with MUP and apart from them, we were the only ones who knew what the situation was, so we decided to create a viber community where people who had crossed the border could share their experiences, and I published that information with the fact that only MUP was helping in providing information.
In view of all this, I also followed the publications by [various] European media, and one day I came across an article in the Irish Times entitled "The Irish can't go to the Republic of Croatia", which was not true. I wrote about it and sent an email to the editor of the Irish Times, and within an hour that title was removed and the article was corrected. In addition to that, a man from Belgium sent a similar article published in the Belgian media via the Viber group, which was then also corrected and changed.
Given that I managed to do it, and the CNTB, which has 70 employees, failed to do it, I believe that I have the right to have my opinion and the right to express it, and I did so. By the way, that Viber community won seven awards and people said that we were the ones doing the work of the CNTB, I did that work exclusively on a voluntary basis, and now the CNTB is the only one filing a lawsuit against me, which is something that is not clear to me.
Regarding the information that a campaign was published by the CNTB for seven markets for which Croatia is a destination that can be reached by car, I read that on June the 1st, 2020. That was published by the CNTB and I criticised it because I thought we should have included the market(s) of Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Switzerland.
In response to the question put forth by the lawyer of the plaintiff as to whether I have inspected the Irish media in printed form, in which it is written that Irish people could not enter the Republic of Croatia, I state that it is difficult for me to obtain printed media from Ireland.
In response to the question of whether or not I had any insight into Irish television or radio before the 12th of June, 2020, I state that the only way of monitoring foreign media that we deal with is online.
To the question of how many publications in the Irish media of that content I came across before June the 12th, 2020, I state that I have read a lot of them, and the publication that I remember is the one that ran in the Irish Times that I testified about. I can't say exactly how many Irish media published such articles, nor can I state the dates on which they were published, at that time I was working 18 hours a day and followed a lot of media, so I don't remember.
To the question of how long such information was being published in the Irish media, I answer that the information [of that kind] was brief in the Irish Times because I contacted them, and if I hadn't, it would probably have been there much longer. Specifically, I only contacted the Irish Times, while a Belgian citizen from the Viber community contacted the Belgian media. I personally saw the publication [in question] in the Belgian media, and that Belgian citizen sent the link to me. I don't know exactly which Belgian media it is, but if necessary I can go through my emails and find out. I assume it was shortly after the announcement in the Irish Times because I was writing about that announcement when I got the information about this one. The publication in the Belgian media was in French and I speak French. That Belgian citizen's name is Didier. That gentleman could have driven a car from Belgium to Hvar since he could not get a flight there. I don't know what the exact address of the Belgian media is, Didier sent them a correction.
To the question put forth by the plaintiff's lawyer as to whether the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia had permission from their countries to enter the Republic of Croatia during the months of May, June and July, I state that this caused issues for me because this information changed very quickly and it was difficult to find out at any given moment in time. There was a period when the Serbian borders were closed and the Hungarian borders remained open, so through the Viber community, we advised Serbian citizens to come to Croatia via Hungary. I don't know if Swiss citizens had permission to enter Croatia from April to July 2020. In July, the situation changed, Americans could not fly via Frankfurt, so Switzerland allowed travel via Zurich. I don't know what the share of travellers from Belgium and Ireland was before 2020, nor do I know what the share of travellers from Switzerland was. I know that Serbia was one of the most attractive markets for Croatia for tourism.
Regarding business cooperation with the plaintiff, I state that I occasionally wrote articles for them in the period from 2016 to 2018, and in 2019 and 2020 I offered them cooperation, so for three projects I was at a meeting [with them] in March 2020 - the project regarding digital nomads in the Republic of Croatia, religious tourism and the Olympic Games Festival of traditional Dalmatian Games. I offered the Minister of Tourism our Viber platform for information about the coronavirus and travel, I thought it would be stronger if it was official, but he did not get back to us. I did not offer him business cooperation under market conditions. I don't remember if it was before June the 12th, 2020. The 2020 [tourist] season ended well in Croatia compared to other competitor countries.
In response to the question put forth by the lawyer of the plaintiff, I state that in the press release of the tourist board dated June the 1st, 2020, it was stated that Croatia was opening its borders to seven markets - Slovenia, Austria, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland, Germany and Hungary, while there were no other campaigns ever since the 1st of March, 2020, when all activities of the CNTB were stopped due to the [public health] crisis, and even though the borders were opened on the 13th of May, 2020, only on the 1st of June, 2020 was there a new campaign which meant three weeks of nothing.
I have nothing more to say, there are no more questions.
The parties unanimously state that they have no further evidentiary proposals, and they propose to close the main hearing.
No further evidence will be taken.
The file and the documentation attached to the file have been read.
The plaintiff proposes the court accept the claim in its entirety, with compensation for the costs of the litigation according to the bill of costs which they have submitted.
The defendant proposes the court reject the claim of the plaintiff, with compensation for the costs of the litigation according to the bill of costs which they have submitted.
The main discussion has been closed.
The hearing for the publication and delivery of the verdict is scheduled for: January the 13th, 2023 at 09:50 - Room 219/II.
To follow Diary of a Croatian Lawsuit into its fourth calendar year, follow the dedicated TCN section.
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What is it like to live in Croatia? An expat for 20 years, you can follow my series, 20 Ways Croatia Changed Me in 20 Years, starting at the beginning - Business and Dalmatia.
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