Commenting on claims by former President Stjepan Mesic that when taking up office as President he found documents at the Office of the President in total disarray and that none of the envelopes with confidential documents was sealed, a former advisor and deputy chief-of-staff of the first Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, Vesna Skare Ozbolt, said on Saturday that during the transfer of powers everything was in its place in the Office of the President and that transcripts were classified and sealed when she handed the office to the then new President Mesic.
Skare Ozbolt said that Mesic should have contacted the police, the state prosecutor's office and secret services immediately so that it could be established which documents were missing and who took them, instead of talking about it 11 years later.
She said that documents at the Office of the President were kept in three places.
Written documents that had to do with the president's daily activities, including notes, reports by ambassadors, and reports from the intelligence community were kept in the president's cabinet. Documentation that was made up exclusively of transcripts was kept in the room next to the office of the president's chief-of-staff, Skare Ozbolt said, adding that it was verbal correspondence concerning the president's conversations with other officials, eye-to-eye talks between the president and individual persons, sessions of the Council for Defence and National Security, meetings of presidential councils, meetings with envoys, etc.
Those were strictly confidential documents or documents marked as a state secret, and they were sealed, Skare Ozbolt said, adding that she handed them over to the then new President Mesic together with the entire presidential office.
The third place for keeping the presidential documents was the archive in the basement of the main building of the Office of the President, where presents the president had received and other documents, such as letters from citizens and notes by presidential advisors, were kept, she said.
Skare Ozbolt said that after Tudjman's death, the government set up a commission to establish which archive materials should go where, so the material referring to the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party was given to the HDZ, the material that referred to the government was sent to the government, the material concerning the work of intelligence agencies was handed over to those agencies, while Tudjman's private correspondence was given to his family.
