"If it's true what the newspapers wrote today, about the appointment of First Deputy Prime Minister Radimir Cacic and Finance Minister Slavko Linic on the Supervisory Board of the INA oil company, it's not several steps back but several years back. That is very worrying," HDZ president Jadranka Kosor told a press conference in the Parliament building.

Kosor said that Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic and his ministers had often repeated that ministers would not be members of supervisory boards. "If that's true, and I still have reservations, can we trust them at all?" she added.

Kosor said that the possible appointment of Cacic on the INA Supervisory Board would raise a series of issues, citing a letter which Cacic had reportedly sent to the Hungarian oil company MOL. "That will raise a series of very sensitive issues and we will raise them in the coming days," she said.

Kosor also criticised the appointment of Zlatko Koracevic as chairman of the Management Board of the national power company HEP, saying that he was incompetent.

The deputy chairman of the HDZ group in Parliament, Davorin Mlakar, said that Croatia had assumed an international obligation to depoliticise its state administration and entire public sector, but that instead the government was appointing only politically suitable people. "That's why we are likely to have problems with the European Commission, because during the monitoring process the government will certainly have to explain why, instead of further depoliticisation, it has taken the opposite direction," he said.

Kosor said that the HDZ was opposed to the government's plan to decriminalise soft drugs. "All drugs are dangerous. There are no soft drugs or hard drugs, all drugs threaten young people's lives," she said.