ZAGREB, 9 March 2022 - Parliament on Wednesday gave a vote of confidence in Ivan Paladina as the new minister of construction, physical planning and state assets, after which he was sworn in.

He was supported by 77 lawmakers in the 151-seat legislature, while 51 were against and three abstained.

An entrepreneur and manager with more than 15 years of experience in strategic and executive leadership in different fields of business, Paladina is taking over the ministry from Darko Horvat, who resign last month on suspicion of illegal allocation of incentives to small businesses while he served as the economy minister in 2018.

Paladina is faced with numerous challenges due to slow post-earthquake reconstruction in the Zagreb and Banovina areas.

Earlier today the parliamentary construction and economy committees supported by majority vote, a conclusion to appoint Paladina as the new minister.

During the hearings, the opposition questioned his private businesses such as Kupari, Hidroelektra, the Croatian Postal Bank and the IGH Institute as well as his alleged Russian ties.

Prime Minister Andrej Plenković attended the hearings, calling the argument that Paladina is a Russian player ridiculous and reiterating that Paladina has not had contact with Russian companies in four or five years.

Paladina called on the MPs to report him to the authorities if they felt there was anything contentious in his role.

"I will also say that even if someone was Russian, should we really sever all contacts with him just because of the brutal aggression on Ukraine?" said Plenković.

With his entrepreneurial and managerial experience, he added, Paladina should accelerate the reconstruction process.

Addressing the committees, Paladina said "it's a fact that reconstruction has not started on even one building in Zagreb. That's what we must work on the most." He added that reconstruction was under way in the Banovina region and that progress would be seen soon.

Paladina said he would call Zagreb Mayor Tomislav Tomašević tomorrow to convene a meeting and start to actively deal with every obstacle on a daily basis so that reconstruction could start as soon as possible.

For more information on this, check out our dedicated politics section.

ZAGREB, 9 March 2022 - Ivan Paladina, who has been nominated as the candidate for the new construction minister, said on Wednesday that he could not turn down the proposal made by Prime Minister Andrej Plenković for his nomination as it is a call to rebuild the earthquake-affected homes of Croatian citizens.

"We have little time and a lot of work to do. I accepted this proposal as it also concerns the call to reconstruct the homes of our compatriots," Paldina said while presenting his agenda at a joint meeting of the parliamentary committees on construction and the economy today.

He said that he is always guided by principles of cooperation, inclusion of different opinions and that he always listens to the opinions of professionals and wants to make things simpler.

"Administrative obstacles must not slow down the reconstruction of anyone's home and they must not hinder progress. People, who suffered damage in the (2020) earthquakes, must not fall victim to rules", he said.

He will also focus on making legislative changes so as to accelerate the processes of post-quake reconstruction.

Concerning the criticism from the Opposition that he was an executive of the company that ran the Kupari Luxury Hotels project, Paladina underscored that he had withdrawn from that project four years ago and that he launched procedures to exit from ownership, in this case, two years ago.

"All the investments I was included in were conducted in line with the law and market principles, and I paid my taxes accordingly", he said.

In response to the questions from opposition MPs, Paladina said that to date he has completed many successful investment projects in construction and real estate and that his experience could be useful for the post-quake reconstruction.

The ministerial nominee said that he had already consulted experts and has detected the main problems in the process of the post-quake reconstruction.

For more information on this, check out our dedicated politics section.

ZAGREB, 9 March 2022 - Prime Minister Andrej Plenković on Wednesday presented the nominated minister of construction, Ivan Paladina, in the parliament, and said that the candidate's experience and enthusiasm are supposed to be a useful contribution to his cabinet.

"The government needs a man with the experience in the construction sector, project management, and real estate and with managerial and entrepreneurial skills so as to make the processes more dynamic," Plenković said at the joint meeting of the parliamentary committees on construction and the economy.

Paladina, born in 1983, graduated from a faculty of economics and has also a postgraduate degree in management. He used to be an advisor to the management of Hrvatska Poštanska Bank (HPB) and before that he had been the chair of the management board of the IGH Institut construction company.

The PM said today that the ministerial department of construction and zoning had three important tasks: to accelerate the post-quake reconstruction, to make the issuance of building permits and other documents faster and simpler in order to boost the investment cycle, as well as to make use of the state property.

For more information on this, check out our dedicated politics section.