During a parliamentary discussion on the report on the agency's performance in 2005, opposition MPs also asked for the revocation of the telephone subscription fee claiming that there was no grounds for charging prepaid subscription fee of this kind.
The opposition said that it was a strategic national interest to liberalise the telecommunications market, and for this purpose it was necessary to discontinue the practice of telephone users to pay the subscription fee as well as to make it impossible for the HT to use free of charge distributive channels in the telecommunications network.
Some MPs also pointe the finger at the HT for having bought the IskonInternet company, saying that the merger of these two telecommunications companies was contrary to European Union directives on the free market competition.
Earlier this week, the HT company announced that "with the transaction worth EUR 13.7 million on 30 May 2006 T-Hrvatski Telekom has acquired 100 percent of shares of IskonInternet d.d. Before the purchase Iskon portal was spun off into a separate company called Adriatic Media d.o.o.".
According to the Croatian press, before the acquisition, the HT had a share of 67 percent on the Internet market in Croatia. Now with Iskon's 16-percent share, HT will cover 83 percent of the Internet market.
Jozo Rados of the Croatian People's Party (HNS), said that HT still retained 90 percent of services offered on the fixed telephony market and that prices of telecommunications services in Croatia were two to three times higher than in other neighbouring countries.
With regard to the problem of the distributive channels of the telecommunications network, the Telecommunications Agency chairman, Gasper Gacina, told the parliament that the ownership issues over the said channels were not within the agency's remit.
He, however, proposed amending the Telecommunications Act so as to arrange the use and ownership of the channels.
The ownership over the distributive channels network should be solved at the talks between the Government and the HT company or before a court.
Currently, the operators unlawfully and without any control set their optic cables into those channels, which prevents the network from developing normally and all of this endangers the telecommunications activities, he warned.
Gacina added that the agency would consider the acquisition of the IskonInternet by HT at its next session to establish whether this transaction meant the abuse of monopoly and a threat to the market freedom.