ZAGREB, Feb. 21 (Xinhua) -- Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said on Wednesday that the process of restructuring the country's biggest private company Agrokor would continue, hours after the crisis manager resigned.
Plenkovic stressed that the government was conducting consultations so it could recommend the appointment of a new emergency administration after the state-appointed crisis manager Ante Ramljak resigned on Tuesday evening, Croatian news agency Hina reported.
Ramljak will stay on duty until the government decides on his successor.
With revenues of 6.5 billion euros (7.66 billion U.S. dollars) in 2015, which was almost 16 percent of the country's total GDP, Agrokor, a private food and retail group, is the biggest company in Croatia.
Debt crisis hit the company in January last year and the government reacted with the special law dubbed "Lex Agrokor" that enabled the state to take over the management of the company.
In a public statement, the resigned crisis manager noted that he and his associates had stabilized Agrokor's business, preserved employment, prevented the collapse of suppliers and created conditions for the creditors to negotiate the debt settlement.
"Unfortunately, the uncertainty that was created about my stay at the position of an extraordinary commissioner is strongly against this process. I don't want to become an obstacle to the settlement so I am offering the irrevocable resignation to the position of the extraordinary commissioner," Ramljak explained his resignation.
The crisis manager quit over claims about conflicts of interests. On Jan. 30, Croatian media reported lucrative deals between Agrokor and Texto Management, a company where Ramljak worked before Agrokor. Texto Management is allegedly paid for its advice around 240,000 kuna each week (almost 40,000 U.S. dollars).
On Feb. 19, media revealed that Ramljak was officially employed in the Texto Management company even 20 days after the government appointed him to be an extraordinary manager of the deeply indebted Agrokor.
A day before Ramljak resigned, Croatian president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic said in an interview with weekly paper Globus that "no individual is worth compromising everything good that has been done over the past ten months about the crisis in the Agrokor conglomerate".
She emphasized that Ramljak's position as the Government Commissioner was unsustainable because of adviser's fees that were deeply immoral and the fact that Ramljak was employed in Texto Management at the same time when he was a crisis manager in Agrokor that later indirectly signed a million-dollar contract with the same company.
The new emergency administration is working on debt settlement. The final plan proposal should be submitted to Croatia's commercial court in Zagreb by April 10.
