April the 13th, 2021 - The Croatian Reconstruction Fund has begun work, and the vast majority of decisions on renovations following the earthquakes which rocked the country in 2020 relate to the City of Zagreb.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Suzana Varosanec writes, the plan for the implementation of the organised reconstruction following the earthquakes, including contracting designers, the preparation of documentation and reconstruction works has all been made available from this week. Given the amount of damage from the earthquakes which struck back in March and December 2020 totalling 127.6 billion kuna and the number of requests that are now open, things will take a very long time to complete.

The total costs of the Croatian Reconstruction Fund in the first three months of 2021 amounted to a staggering 182 million kuna, of which 95 percent was paid out in the form of compensation for damages caused by the devastating 2020 earthquakes. On the other hand, 6433 requests came from the most recently hit Sisak-Moslavina County, 1054 from Zagreb, 351 from Zagreb County, 74 from Krapina-Zagorje County and 5 from Karlovac County.

In the first quarter, the Croatian Reconstruction Fund received temporary solutions for three Zagreb buildings (six more have since been received over recent days), but they require technical and financial control.

It will be implemented by the Croatian Reconstruction Fund and the cases will be returned to the competent Ministry in order to reach their final solutions, but in order to finally act on them, the Croatian Government must adopt another programme of measures that will work to clearly define all of the procedures from building demolition to reconstruction.

What seems to be going quite quickly, according to the director of the Fund Damir Vandjelic, are the payments for emergency interventions, with the staffing of Vandjelic's closest team of associates and the organisation of key services.

The director of the Public Procurement Documentation Service is Sasa Miroslavic, who was the head of the public procurement sector at the Ministry of Health, while the director of the Independent Fraud Prevention Service, Davor Iljkcć, was in the Ministry of the Interior for sixteen years, also as a group leader in the Economic Crime Service.

Miroslavic is in charge of a transparent way of procurement management within the Croatian Reconstruction Fund. The first criminal report on the suspicion of a possible criminal offense of abuse during the emergency intervention, in the amount (unofficially) of 1.5 million kuna, however, has already been forwarded to the State Attorney's Office and will be looked into.

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