Hungary's oil and gas company MOL said on Thursday it had no intention of shutting down the refinery in Sisak, about 50 kilometres southeast of Zagreb.
"We have stated several times before that Sisak must not and will not be closed. The closure was never proposed by the Management Board of INA either to the Croatian Government or to MOL," MOL Group said in a statement, adding that it always believed that the Sisak refinery was important for Croatia, for the Croatian economy and for INA.
"Sisak is one of INA's strategic assets about which all important decisions must be made by the two major shareholders of INA unanimously. MOL is a responsible and serious investor in Croatia and we are taking care of the future of Sisak. Together with our strategic partner, the Croatian Government, we support INA to analyze development scenarios to utilize Sisak in the future aiming to safeguard the jobs. We are sure that we will find the right and responsible solution," the statement said.
MOL said that the latest and only proposal which explicitly implied the closure of the Sisak refinery was made in June 1998 by the then-executive management of INA led by Davor Stern.
The statement followed the publication of an article in the Business.hr daily on Thursday saying that "the Hungarians want to shut down the Sisak refinery" and that "1,000 workers are being laid off".
The chairman of the INA Supervisory Board, Davor Stern, told press he was pleased that MOL had declared its commitment to the further operation of the Sisak refinery, adding that he wished to see concrete figures as to how much the Hungarian company would invest in the modernisation of the refinery. He said that the Management Board had presented to the Supervisory Board the development strategy until 2015 and that the Croatian members requested its further elaboration and expressed their wish for the further operation and modernisation of the refinery. Stern said that this was not explicitly mentioned in the present strategy.
When asked to comment on MOL's claim that the last proposal for the closure of the Sisak refinery was made in 1998 when he headed the INA Management Board, Stern said that no such proposal had been made.
