Amid recent reports from the expert witness who revealed his damning findings about just how much of Agrokor's company money the Todorić family used for their own personal expenses, Ivica Todorić, the former owner of Agrokor, hits back publicly.
"The key thing I want to point out today is the fact that the money they're talking about for the fourth time, in what I have to admit is the most totally sensationalist manner, is my money, and I've paid all of the necessary taxes on it," stated the former Agrokor owner and boss.
Ivica Todorić spoke up about the matter in a post after the Croatian newspaper Jutarnji list published a shocking article about how much he and his family withdrew from Agrokor. As expected, Todorić has stated that all of that, and all that we see today, stems from the political need of Prime Minister Andrej Plenković and his government associates to try to hide their illegal, criminal acts surrounding the former Agrokor.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 1st of July, 2019, here is his statement is transmitted (and translated) in its entirety:
''Over the past few weeks, my team and I have presented a whole host of new evidence on the criminal acts carried out by the Prime Minister of the Republic of Croatia, Andrej Plenković, and his associates (the Borg Group and others, who've been very specifically mentioned), and we've presented what is, so far, the most comprehensive record of the crimes that took place within Agrokor. That document also has a number of high-profile addresses in the European Union in it.
The first thing I want to say to you, Mr. Plenković, is that you can see that Agrokor is not "PASSE".
Secondly, Mr. Plenković, the Agrokor affair and the Borg affair are the biggest corruption affairs in the history of this part of Europe, and you know that yourself today, as do the citizens of the Republic of Croatia, as does the region and the rest of Europe, they know it very well.
Thirdly, it's obvious that the fact that you've become a burden to yourself bothers you a lot, and with the same intensity, it probably bothers you a lot that you've become a political and legal bomb for the EU. If the content of ''findings'' published on the front page of a certain newspaper is true, then those findings, as I've already said, are fictitious criminal documents, perhaps also falsified, they're just your regular professionally created rubbish.
Everything we see today stems from the political need of Prime Minister Plenković and his associates in an attempt to try to hide their illegal, criminal acts. They're so afraid that they obviously don't understand how their attempts to conceal annihilation are failing because everything is on the table, and around the world, too.
The key thing I want to point out today is the fact that the money they're talking about for the fourth time, in what I have to admit is the most totally sensationalist manner, is my money, and I've paid all of the necessary taxes on it. Therefore, nobody ''took'' anything, that was my money, Becase Agrokor was a private company from 1989 until April 2017. I personally had private money there in accordance with the law, and I paid my taxes on that money correctly.
The Government of Croatia, governed by Andrej Plenković, is breaking down and is continuing with this fake news about me and my family, repeating the same untruths for the fourth time, to draw attention away from the enormous amounts of disturbing affairs, specifically from the recent HNS request for the dismissal of Minister Lovro Kuščević, and what's obviously for them a very unfavourable development of events surrounding the constitution of key EU bodies.
So, to repeat, I spent my private money, and Plenković and his associates have stolen someone else's money.
Obviously today in Croatia, under HDZ, not only can criminals nationalise and loot a private company with the use of an illegal law, but also decide who can do what with their own money which they've duly paid their taxes on.
I'm sure this won't go on for much longer.''
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