The Office of the Chief State Prosecutor (DORH) has dismissed claims that it failed to act on warnings about murky business practices and possible wrongdoing in the stone and marble company Jadrankamen, saying that the responsible prosecutorial authorities in Split and the police were acting on reports of suspected criminal activity, but that the case involved complex investigative work and evidence collection and that decisions in such cases could not be made in a short period of time.
In a statement published on its web site on Friday, the DORH said, among other things, that Jadrankamen's former management board chair Vedran Vilovic was indicted for violation of the right to work and other rights after the Independent Trade Union in Jadrankamen pressed charges against him.
Acting on reports of possible wrongdoing in Jadrankamen and its subsidiaries, prosecutorial authorities have been working on collecting evidence, including demanding financial audits, to find out if a large sum of money was transferred from the bank account of a company from Split into Jadrankamen's account, the DORH said, adding that a decision on that case would be made soon and that the public would be informed of it in due time.
The DORH also says that the office of the municipal prosecutor in Split on March 19 received a report from the Split County police against two people suspected of defrauding Jadrankamen and that work was under way to collect evidence in that case as well.
The trade union of workers at Jadrankamen claims that state institutions had made it possible for Jadrankamen owner Bruno Oresar for years to defraud the company and avoid payment of financial obligations to state funds and that prosecutorial authorities failed to act in a timely fashion on reports of wrongdoing.
The union has said that Jadrankamen workers have not received their salaries since August 2009 and that the former owner of the once successful company had siphoned large sums of money from it, causing it to go bankrupt.
