Sanader Sentenced To 2.5 Yrs For War Profiteering

Former prime minister and former HDZ president Ivo Sanader was found guilty of war profiteering on Monday in a Hypo case retrial and sentenced to two and a half years pending appeal.

ZAGREB, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Oct, 2018 ) :Former prime minister and former HDZ president Ivo Sanader was found guilty of war profiteering on Monday in a Hypo case retrial and sentenced to two and a half years pending appeal.

Zagreb County Court judge Jasna Galesic said Sanader must return HRK 3.6 million into the state budget.

In the Hypo case, Sanader was accused of taking a commission in that amount when he was a deputy foreign minister after Austria's Hypo bank gave Croatia a loan to buy diplomatic office buildings. At the time, Croatia was in immediate war danger, so Sanader was also accused of war profiteering.

At the end of the trial, Sanader said he was not a war profiteer. The prosecution said the opposite, claiming in closing arguments that war profiteering had been proved and that he had been downplaying his role the whole time.

Sanader was already sentenced in this case, when he was also sentenced for taking a bribe from MOL director Zsolt Hernadi in exchange of management rights in INA. However, the Constitutional Court quashed the ruling in the Hypo case and requested a retrial.

The quashed sentence was the first sentence for war profiteering delivered after the Constitutional Court ruled that there was no statute of limitations on that crime. Quashing it, the Court said the Zagreb County Court and the Supreme Court did not establish if thestatute of limitations applied when Sanader was accused and that they failed to enforcea milder law.