During a parliamentary debate on the execution of the state budget in the first half of 2006, SDP deputies criticised the government for withholding information on growing deficit and inflation, insolvency, wage stagnation and declining pension benefits, insisting that such data would prove that the government's bragging about economic growth was unfounded.
"If the indicators were so bad as you claim them to be, Croatia wouldn't have been near completion of the stand-by arrangement with the International Monetary Fund and wouldn't have been granted international loans at low interest rates," Suker said.
Suker said it was not good that opposition officials were giving unsubstantiated data to World Bank interviewers "because we all should be working in the interests of this country to ensure that both home and abroad it enjoys the status it deserves."
"The government is not providing information on the actual state of the Croatian economy, but is selecting what suits it and is disregarding the rest," SDP deputy Mato Crkvenac said.
Another SDP member of Parliament, Slavko Linic, claimed that the balance of payments deficit, which he said might reach 12 billion US dollars by year's end, was affecting economic growth and exports. He insisted that the inflation rate was four per cent and that the government was withholding this information from the public.
Responding to accusations of insolvency and lack of transparency in spending budgetary funds, Suker blamed it on the previous, SDP-led coalition government.
"It's not good to accuse somebody of something and forget what you did before," Suker said, emphasising that it was unrealistic to believe that international financial organisations, such as the IMF, knew nothing about the data presented by the SDP.