- Published: 23.04.2015.
PM inaugurates motorway section
Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic on Wednesday inaugurated a 11.2 kilometre section of the Zagreb-Sisak Motorway between Busevac and Lekenik.
The construction of the section began in 2010, costing HRK 700 million. Now 22 km of the 48-km-long Zagreb-Sisak Motorway are operational.
Milanovic said the motorway's section in the Zagreb area would be opened in September.
"Despite modest traffic on Croatian motorways and their expensiveness, they are ours and they are valuable," he said.
He said the government was pursuing plan B for the monetisation of motorway opeartors' debt with an initial public offering of the HAC ONC operator's shares. He said this plan was more moderate, but good, recalling that the initial monetisation plan had also envisaged the participation of the pension funds. Milanovic said citizens should not pay interest on expensive loans for motorway construction and that this money should be invested in roads, railways and other infrastructure.
Asked by the press if the timing was bizarre of recent Constitutional Court decisions against referendums on the outsourcing of non-core activities in the public sector and the leasing of motorways, Milanovic said he would not comment on the timing, only that nearly all government arguments had been accepted in the decision against the motorway lease referendum and that the manipulation of the referendum question had been revealed. "I guess it's clear to everyone now that no one wanted to sell anything off... only to keep the money instead of paying interest."
Asked if he would meet with President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, who invited him to her office, Milanovic said he had initiated two meetings because the president had forgotten to do so, at the Defence Council and the National Security Council, where both the government and the president had jurisdiction.
"I expected the president to think of that first. She didn't, so I thought of it. We prepared and did that well, and the government and parliament are functioning normally," he said, adding that he hoped to meet with the president at an upcoming commemoration in Jasenovac.
(EUR 1 = HRK 7.6)
(Hina) ha