Quaestus Invest, an investment fund management company managing the real-estate fund Quaestus Nekretnine, said in a statement on Monday that the decision of the Croatian agency for the supervision of financial services, HANFA, to take away for a period of one year Quaestus Invest's operating licence, was unjustified and motivated by HANFA's hostility towards members of Quaestus Invest's management, announcing that it would sue HANFA.
"HANFA's decision is nothing but a defamatory pamphlet, contrary to facts and the actual state of the fund, it is unjust, tendentious and malevolent," reads the statement signed by Quaestus Invest's management board members Borislav Skegro and Tomislav Matic.
HANFA on September 29 took away Quaestus Invest's operating licence for one year, giving the Supervisory Board of Quaestus Nekretnine 60 days from receipt of its decision to sign an agreement on fund management with a new company.
Explaining its decision, HANFA said that it had found that Quaestus Invest and Quaestus Nekretnine had been violating the Law on Investment Funds and other regulations for a long period of time.
In its 22-page decision, HANFA explains in detail the identified irregularities.
Skegro and Matic believe that HANFA's decision is motivated exclusively "by an attempt to square accounts with and persecute members of the Quaestus Invest management board, particularly one of them" and that the decision to take away the operating licence had been timed to coincide with the forthcoming recess in the work of the parliament, the government and the HANFA management.
"The political order to HANFA's management came some 18 months ago from individuals who felt threatened losing their political posts," said Skegro and Matic.
They said they would appeal against HANFA's decision at the Constitutional Court and sue HANFA for harming Quaestus Invest's reputation.
