The leader of the largest opposition party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), Tomislav Karamarko on Friday said that he did not agree with the conclusions of the parliamentary Committee for Home Affairs and National Security that there was no abuse of powers or any violation of the law during the recent affair of providing the police with printouts of phone records of some senior officials of the intelligence community and some business people.
"We gave our dissenting opinion to what was voted (by the committee). I considered it was more important to prepare the HDZ's pre-election coalition agreement with (non-parliamentary) Pensioners' Party (BUZ) than to be in the Sabor, because I knew we would be outvoted", he said in response to reporters' questions about his nonattendance of the committee's meeting.
Karamarko said he did not believe that the committee managed to prove that unlawful acts were not committed.
Asked about one of the committee's conclusions that noted that a committee member (with allusions to him) had had insight into a classified document and whether he feared that the state prosecutor could prosecute him, Karamarko said that the conclusion itself was controversial.
Karamarko does not not fear any investigation as, he said, he had made his conclusions on the matter and presented them at a press conference in October which was then exploited to accuse him of having insight into the documents before he was allowed to by law, and that this then served to build a mosaic based on what had already been said by President Ivo Josipovic and Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic as well as as a report in the Vecernji List daily.
Recalling that it was the HDZ that suggested an inquiry commission to be formed to investigate this scandal, Tomislav Culjak of the HDZ who also sits on the parliamentary home affairs committee said that conclusions voted today did not present a true picture of the national security system which had been threatened with the (phone records) affair.
The parliamentary Committee for Home Affairs and National Security on Friday adopted conclusions with a majority vote that there was no misuse of authority in requesting phone records and that the law had not been violated although deputies of the HDZ and HDSSB (Croatian Democratic Party of Slavonia and Baranja) voted against the conclusions.
The committee's chairman Miroslav Tudjman (HDZ) said that the scandal had undermined the reputation of the Republic of Croatia and harmed the national security system and the reputation of some heads of the country's national security.
