The HST said in a press release issued on Tuesday that it had nothing against the arrival of the third operator on the Croatian market, but it disagreed with the model according to which it was being now conducted.
The trade union recalls that the said consortium included two companies -- Dalekovod and Croatia Osiguranje -- which are state-owned companies, and therefore the union concludes it seems that the state of Croatia is competitor to itself given that it already holds 49 percent in one of the two existing operators: Croatian Telecommunications (HT).
The union added that the biggest problem lay in the fact that Borislav Skegro and Tomislav Matic, leading managers in the Questus Fund, which had arranged the establishment of the said consortium, were engaged in the entire project after they had been also leading figures in the privatisation of the HT in 1999. Skegro and Matic are the only ones who know all about secret transactions between the then Croatian government and the Deutsche Telekom. Therefore, their engagement in the bid of the TELE 2 was a classic example of conflict of interest, and Skegro and Matic may inflict damage to the HT, the trade union said.