More than 1000 investors have invested in this Croatian company, raising its market value to a massive 45 million euros. As Poslovni Dnevnik/Bernard Ivezic writes on the 3rd of December, 2019, Greyp Bikes, whose founder and director is the incredible Croatian entrepreneur from Livno, Mate Rimac, has raised 1.44 million euros in capital, 79 percent more than the target, through the popular German platform Neufund.

This concludes, and very successfully so, the first regulated blockchain and cryptocurrency group investment campaign in a company located here in Europe. In the USA, such investment campaigns have been underway since May 2016, the crowdsourcing platforms and campaigns are overseen there by the SEC regulator and FINRA.

Here at home in Europe, however, the move by the Croatian electric car manufacturer and Greyp Bikes owner sets a real precedent on the financial markets here. Greyp Bikes has launched the first legal Equity Token Offering (ETO) in the whole of Europe.

Its compliance with the law was monitored by the Liechtenstein Financial Market Authority (FMA) regulator. ETO is a combination of the controversial and unregulated Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and the more traditional and preregulated Initial Public Offering (IPO). In recent years, many entrepreneurs have opted to raise capital through ICOs because of the low costs involved, which has created pressure on the offer of expensive investment mechanisms, such as IPOs, upon which the world stock exchanges from the NYSE and LSE to the ZSE are based.

Mario Vojvoda, ETO project manager at Greyp Bikes and co-founder and technical director of Croatian startup Tolar, says they have opened a new opportunity for EU companies and investors: "ETO investing will increase financing opportunities for all companies and democratise the availability of money, which is something crucial in markets like the Croatian one, which isn't so much in the focus of big investors,'' stated Vojboboda, noting that Greyp Bikes' ETO still didn't go all that smoothly despite the excellent results we now see in the end.

Potentially the biggest problem was created by the German regulator BaFina, which, as soon as it found out what was going on, issued a statement accusing the Croatian company of potentially issuing a public offering without a prospectus through the aforementioned German platform.

BaFina argued that there was no exemption from the obligation to publish a prospectus for all campaigns advertised in Germany under their Securities Act. It also demanded clarification from Greyp Bikes. Neither Neufund, Greyp Bikes or even crypto experts saw the issue as ETO approval was issued by the Liechtenstein FMA. This turned the debate into a weighing-in of the forces of the two EU regulators. The direction in which that all went is best described by the fact that BaFina did not seek a ban on Greyp Bikes' campaign, that is, it was more than successfully concluded.

Mario Vojvoda politely declined to comment on BaFina's move, but stressed that the most important thing for them from the beginning of campaign planning was that the process was regulatory-compliant and fully legal.

"We've made great efforts to have a serious, transparent, clear and legally clean process and we consider our process to be completely regular," stated Vojboda. He added that it is absolutely crucial for them to have a dialogue with regulators and to make sure all the details are clear. All of this fuss failed affect the ETO campaign. Greyp Bikes had planned to raise 805,617 euros, and in the end, a total of 1017 investors bought stakes in the Croatian company in the amount of 1.44 million euros.

As a result, Greyp Bikes now has a market value of 45 million euro or more than 330 million kuna. Here in Croatia, Funderbeam SEE offers a similar investment opportunity, but for example without cryptocurrency payments. However, as with stock exchanges, it seems crucial to choose a specific target group of investors. Namely, some of the biggest investors and biggest business partners in Mate Rimac's businesses so far come from Germany.

"The campaign has aroused a lot of investor interest and has thus enabled us to create a technology-loving community that is ready for bold steps in technology development, in which it will actively participate with Greyp, Bikes" explained Vojvoda.

Mate Rimac, founder and CEO of Greyp Bikes, sees the company with revenues of one billion kuna by 2024. Last year, according to Fina, the company reduced revenue from 3.6 kuna down to 3.2 million kuna, while the company's losses increased from 2.7 kuna to 7.7 million kuna. On the other hand, it sees growth in the use of blockchain in smart traffic. Neufund itself is already preparing three new ETO campaigns for two startups from Germany and one from India.

Make sure to follow our dedicated Made in Croatia and business pages for much more.

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 3rd of December, 2019, the CEO of Enikom Aerospace, Marko Josip Andrijanić, and Vukovar Mayor Ivan Penava signed an agreement on leasing office space at the Business Industrial Centre in Vukovar on Tuesday, which will result in the employment of 200 workers in the production of interior components for both passenger and business aircraft.

"I'm looking forward to working with Vukovar, in which we plan to expand our business," said Andrijanić, stating that Enikom Aerospace has been manufacturing interiors for commercial and private aircraft for more than 40 years in several locations: in the US, Germany, Zagreb and soon in Vukovar. The company, he added, is also working with one of the largest suppliers of aircraft parts for Airbus and Boeing.

 With a direct and very large investment and the employment of about 200 workers, Andrijanić has also opened up the possibility of business cooperation with local entrepreneurs and suppliers in various segments from Vukovar.

He thanked the mator of Vukovar, Ivan Penava and all those involved who enabled the company to expand into the typically overlooked Slavonia and Vukovar with a serious and professional approach.

The Vukovar plant will open its doors in the second quarter of 2020, and future workers, from NKV workers to engineers, will be obliged to undergo training, announced the executive vice president of the company, Jakov Barišić.

"There is no school for our work, we will train the workers and everyone will undergo internal training at our facilities in Croatia and abroad," Barišić said, adding that workers' earnings would certainly be above the Croatian average.

He announced that full employment would occur within a period of three years, when up to 1,500 different parts and components for the aviation industry would emerge from production lines in Vukovar daily. Vukovar's Mayor Penava emphasised that in recent years, a business environment has been created in Vukovar that has led to the opening of new, technologically advanced industries, such as the pharmaceutical and IT sectors, and now the aviation industry is recognising the city's potential.

"As a city, we have offered what we've got, which is namely reliability, transparency and openness, as well as the most favourable conditions," Penava said. 

Recalling the pre-war times, when Vukovar had about 45,000 inhabitants and 29,000 jobs, Penava stated that today it has about 20,000 inhabitants and that employment has exceeded 10,000. He stressed that 200 new jobs mean a lot, but that in recent years the problem of Vukovar is not just to do with finding jobs, but with a poor demographic picture.

Make sure to follow our dedicated business page for much more.

When you think of Rogotin... Actually, no, hang on, how many people have actually heard of this southern Croatian village? Rogotin is a small settlement located along the fruitful Neretva river, close to Ploče, and isn't all that from the popular City of Dubrovnik. Located right in the very heart of watermelon and tangerine country in warm, sunny southern Dalmatia, very few tourists have ever been there.

Unless you have relatives who come from Rogotin, or indeed the little towns and villages surrounding it, it's highly unlikely you've ever heard of it. Mainly a village to pass through on the way somewhere, those who do know of it associate it with precisely the above - watermelons and tangerines. It might come as a shock, in that case, that a company has decided to construct wind organs in Rogotin. 

As Morski writes on the 3rd of December, 2019, on the Trovro hill in Rogotin, employees of the Dubrovnik-based company Trag have begun construction of the first wind organs which will be able to be seen from the village of Rogotin itself.

As local portal Rogotin.hr reports, the concrete base on which wind organs will be built has already been constructed and dealt with, and all of the necessary material for the construction is currently transported to the top of the hill by a special vehicle.

These wind organs will "catch" the often powerful bura and thus create sound from it. Along with this truly unique project, the plans are to build two more wind organs, one from the direction of Ploče, a somewhat larger town in the Neretva area, which will generate sound using the maestral winds, and one from the direction of the Neretva river itself, which will use the strong jugo winds to create sound.

Make sure to follow our dedicated lifestyle page for much more.

ZAGREB, December 3, 2019 - The GONG nongovernmental organisation said on Tuesday that it was intolerable that the government was disregarding laws and undermining the work of the independent Commission for the Prevention of Conflict of Interest, noting that a team should be sent to investigate the government for hiding documents in the Helsinki case.

"We are witnessing a situation in which an important anti-corruption body, chaired by Nataša Novaković, a week before International Anti-Corruption Day, December 9, is closing the Helsinki case because the prime minister and the government are persistently refusing to hand over documents on a trip to a meeting of the European People's Party (EPP) in Helsinki in late 2018," GONG said.

The NGO believes that the Commissioner for Information should send a team to investigate the government for hiding information, which, under the law, should be available to every citizen.

It therefore called on the Information Commissioner to act ex officio and send an inspection team to the government to help determine facts in the Helsinki case.

Novakovic said earlier in the day that no proceedings would be initiated against Plenković and several current and former ministers from the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) for their trip to Helsinki on 7 and 8 November 2018 as the Conflict of Interest Commission had not been provided with necessary documents and data from the competent departments.

The Commission decided that the officials in question had violated principles of conduct as prescribed by legislation on the prevention of conflict of interest and acted irresponsibly and non-transparently by non-delivering the requested documents.

More news about the conflict of interest issues can be found in the Politics section.

ZAGREB, December 3, 2019 - An oral hearing in a case in which Slovenia is suing the European Commission over the use of the name Teran started before the General Court of the EU in Luxembourg on Tuesday, when Croatia's representative presented the position of her country on this issue.

Slovenia's lawsuit ensued after the European Commission adopted the delegated act in May 2017, specifying the conditions under which the name of the Teran wine grape variety may appear on wine labels of the Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) 'Hrvatska Istra' (Croatian Istria) a Croatian wine, allowing its producers to use the name teran in the labelling of their wines under specific labelling conditions.

Slovenia insists on the revocation of that delegated act.

Croatia's representative Gordana Vidović Mesarek said today that the delegated act actually rectified the injustice which had been done to Croatian wine producers in Istria.

The European Commission has authorized Croatia to use the protected name Teran for its wine, although it is protected as Slovenian. The EC has allowed the use of the name Teran on the wine label with the PDO 'Hrvatska Istra' (Croatian Istria).

In recent years, Slovenian winemakers and the Ministry of Agriculture strongly lobbied in Brussels to ensure that the European Commission withdraws the proposal that the wine produced in Istria from the Teran grape variety can be sold under the label "Croatian Istria - Teran".

Before Croatia's accession to the EU, Slovenia protected Teran as its own product at EU level, meaning that no one but Slovenian winemakers were allowed to sell wine under that name.

Croatia complained against this, saying that Slovenia did not have the right to protect the name because the wine produced in the Slovenian part of the region of Istria under that name was made from the Refosco grape variety, while in the Croatian part of Istria it was made from the Teran grape variety.

In this case before the General Court, Croatia is not a party and its representative only presented Zagreb's position on this matter.

Slovenia's representative said that the current solution could delude buyers who think that the wine is from Slovenia while they buy Croatian wines under that name.

More wine news can be found in the Lifestyle section.

An almost unbelievable story about a couple of Nigerian students visiting Zagreb appeared in the Bosnian media today.

[Let's preface this article by saying that no Croatian news media has thus far been able to corroborate the story, so it's possible that things aren't exactly like Bosnian Žurnal says they are, but we're sure more will be written about this in days to come.]

The story is as follows: a group of Nigerian nationals (four students and a teacher) participated in the 5th World InterUniversities Championships, which took place on the 13th - 17th of November in Pula, Croatia. 18-year old Abia Uchenna Alexandro represented his Owerri Federal Institute of Technology, playing table tennis at the competition. After the competition, the group returned to Zagreb, where they waited for their flight back home, through Istanbul. As they were in Zagreb for a day or so, they decided to take a walk around the town, which is exactly what he and Eboh Kenneth Chinedu, his colleague, did.

As soon as they entered the tram, they were stopped by the Croatian police and taken to the police station. They tried explaining who they were, and that their documents are in the hostel where they were staying. The police refused to listen to what they were saying, and they put them in a van in the middle of the night.

They drove to an unfamiliar location, where the two cops told them that they were going back to Bosnia. The two Nigerian students tried explaining that they've never set foot in Bosnia, that they arrived in Zagreb by airplane, but again, nobody listened to them. The van stopped and they pushed them out into the bushes. Eboh refused to start walking in the direction where police were directing them to, and one of the policemen told him that he would shoot if he didn't start walking.

There were other migrants being pushed back to Bosnia at the same time by the Croatian police, and they helped the two Nigerians get to the camp in Velika Kladuša.

They managed to get a hold of one of their colleagues who was still in Zagreb, to send them their documents. Their visa for Croatia expires today, Eboh told Žurnal. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) runs the camp where they are now, and they've supposedly confirmed to Žurnal that the two Nigerian students have valid visas for Croatia and that they were at the competition. [Both Abia Uchenna and Eboh Kenneth are listed as the participants at the table tennis competition at the event: table tennis schedule].

The organisers of the competition, the InterUniversities Sport Committee confirmed to Žurnal that they're aware of this case. Alberto Tanghetti from the Committee says that all 5 participants from Nigeria had valid visas. He confirms that they also sad return airplane tickets to Istanbul and then Lagos. They were recorded by Croatian television at the competition, and the police in Pula was notified that they were in Pula. He said that the organisation would try to contact Croatian police and see if there's anything they can do to help the students.

Video by Žurnal.info

ZAGREB, December 3, 2019 - Croatian 15-year-old students' ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges, as measured by the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), is below the average, according to the latest PISA survey.

PISA surveys are conducted every three years. So far there have been seven surveys and Croatia participated in the last five.

The latest PISA survey, conducted in 2018, covered 600,000 students in 79 countries which had about 32 million 15-year-old students.

In Croatia, the assessment was conducted in 179 secondary and four primary schools in the spring of 2018, involving a total of 6,609 15-year-olds.

Considering trends over a 12-year-long span, Croatian students' performance in reading and mathematics showed neither improvement nor decline, whereas a considerably negative trend has been observed in science knowledge.

The latest survey shows that the best performers are Chinese students, who are followed by students from Singapore and Macao (China), whereas the Philippines and the Dominican Republic are at the bottom of the ranking.

In this category, the most successful country in Europe in Estonia, with a mean score of 523 points, followed by Finland (520 points) and Ireland (518 scores).

Croatia's performance is below the average, with a mean reading score of 479 points, which ranks it 29th of 77 countries, the National Centre for External Assessment (NCVV) stated on Tuesday.

Croatia's performance is similar to the results in the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Latvia, Italy, Hungary, Lithuania, Iceland, Israel, Russia and Belarus, the centre says.

Broken down by gender, Croatian girls are much better than boys (by a margin of 33 points). Also, students in grammar schools called "gimnazija" are better performers than students from other types of secondary schools.

Estonia is again the top European performer in this category, with a mean score of 523 points, and it is followed by the Netherlands (519 points) and Poland (516).

Croatia's mean score is 464 points, and it ranks 40th out of 78 countries.

In Croatia one in three students fails to reach the basic level of knowledge in this category.

Broken down by gender, male students in Croatia are better than female students, by a 9-point difference. Also, students in grammar schools called "gimnazija" are better performers than students from other types of secondary schools.

The Estonians are again the champions in this category in Europe, with a mean score of 530 points. Finland and Poland follow, with respective mean scores of 522 and 511 points.

Croatia's mean score stands at 472 points and the country is ranked 36th out of 78 countries.

There has been a negative change in the performance of Croatian students in this category over the last three years, with the mean score being reduced by 5 points.

More education news can be found in the Lifestyle section.

ZAGREB, December 3, 2019 - Incumbent President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović on Tuesday handed in to the State Election Commission lists with 231,652 signatures of support for her presidential bid.

"I thank everyone who gave their signatures, whether HDZ members, supporters or other Croatian citizens. I also thank the party for supporting my candidacy and other parties that have supported me as well as volunteers who collected signatures," Grabar-Kitarović said after handing in lists with supporters' signatures.

Commenting on her statement that she would take Zagreb Mayor Milan Bandić cakes to prison if he was convicted, she said that "in every democratic society a person is innocent until proven guilty by a final court ruling."

She would not answer any other questions from the press and neither would HDZ party leader and Prime Minister Andrej Plenković who accompanied her at the helm of a delegation of officials of the HDZ and other parties supporting her candidacy.

Apart from the HDZ, the other parties that support Grabar-Kitarović's presidential bid are Bandić's Labour and Solidarity Party, the Croatian Christian Democratic Party (HDS) and the Croatian Party of Rights - Ante Starčević (HSP AS).

More news about the presidential elections can be found in the Politics section.