Darko Beuk, a former head of the Hrvatske Sume state-owned forest management company who was accused in the Fimi Media corruption case, on Wednesday plea-bargained with the prosecution and was given a suspended sentence of 11 months with five years' probation.
Coming out of the Zagreb County Court, Beuk said the entire case had been an omission that "wasn't intentional," a wrong step at the wrong time.
His attorney, Mate Matic, said his client could not have been given a milder suspended sentence, as the crime of which he was accused carried a sentence of one to ten years in prison.
"This is the best solution for my client, even though he didn't gain even one cent, which he wasn't charged with anyway. The fact is that he helped someone make money and that someone was (the) Fimi Media (marketing company)," said Matic.
He added that if Beuk had not made a plea bargain, the proceedings would have taken several years.
Beuk was charged with hiring Fimi Media from September 2006 to December 2007, when he was the management board chairman at Hrvatske Sume, for various jobs at prices above the market, thus defrauding his company of a little over HRK 1 million.
He was accused of having done that at the request of then prime minister and HDZ party president Ivo Sanader and the then ruling party's treasurer, Mladen Barisic. The prosecution claims Beuk knew that Fimi Media served for collecting money for the HDZ.
The indictment against Beuk is the third one the Zagreb County Prosecutor's Office has filed against people in charge in state institutions and companies who, at the request of Sanader and Barisic, did business with the privately-owned Fimi Media, using it to siphon money for an HDZ slush fund.
Aside from Beuk, the others accused of abuse of office and siphoning funds for the HDZ are former Croatian Motorways executives Mario Crnjak, Jurica Prskalo and Josip Sapunar, the former head of the Rijeka-Zagreb Motorway company, Zlatko Korpar, and the former director of the Environmental Protection and Energy Efficiency Fund, Vinko Mladineo.
The Office for the Suppression of Corruption and Organised Crime (USKOK) has also filed an indictment in this case, against former Interior Minister Ivica Kirin, charged with hiring Fimi Media to siphon money for the HDZ, his party at the time.
They are charged with defrauding the state budget of about HRK 20 million in total.
The first indictment in the Fimi Media case, the biggest corruption scandal in Croatian history, was filed in December, against the HDZ, Sanader, Barisic, former HDZ accountant Branka Pavosevic, former party and government spokesman Ratko Macek, Fimi Media owner Nevenka Jurak, and two of her associates, Anita Loncar-Papes and Bojan Dimic.
The latter two plea-bargained with USKOK, while Sanader and the rest have been on trial since mid-April.
