Former President Stjepan Mesic would not comment on Tuesday's arrest of former Deputy Prime Minister Damir Polancec, but said the latest fraud scandals and the fact that incumbent government officials were saying they did not know about them showed that "a parallel chain of command" had existed in the government of the previous Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, which he hopes will be exposed.
"On the one hand, Sanader respected institutions, while on the other, he had confidants through whom he was doing what those in the government now claim they didn't know about, and these scandals, such as (oil company) INA or (food company) Podravka, are always linked to that parallel system," Mesic told students at Zagreb's Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, where he gave a talk on his presidential term.
He would not speculate if former PM Sanader's accountability would be raised in the wake of the investigation into Polancec. "I don't know if that will lead to Sanader, but these scandals point to a parallel chain of command, and if the government doesn't know who was responsible for it, that should be established in a proper procedure," he said.
Underlining the need for regional cooperation, Mesic said his cooperation with Serbian President Boris Tadic had been better than with former Serbian PM Vojislav Kostunica.
He added, however, that Tadic's failure to attend multilateral meetings was bad for cooperation in the region. "Serbia doesn't have to recognise Kosovo, but we must communicate," said Mesic.
