{"id":19504,"date":"2018-10-23T04:25:44","date_gmt":"2018-10-23T04:25:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=19504"},"modified":"2018-10-23T04:25:44","modified_gmt":"2018-10-23T04:25:44","slug":"croatia-convicts-ex-pm-ivo-sanader-of-war-profiteering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=19504","title":{"rendered":"Croatia convicts ex-PM Ivo Sanader of war profiteering"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Ivo Sanader,\u00a0former prime minister of\u00a0Croatia<\/a>,<\/span>\u00a0has been sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for war profiteering during the country’s 1990s conflict.<\/p>\n

The 65-year-old<\/span>\u00a0was on Monday found guilty of accepting nearly 500,000 euros ($558,500) in bribes from Austria’s Hypo Group Alpe Adria bank when he was a deputy foreign minister.<\/p>\n

The cash came in the form of a five percent commission Sanader collected on the bank loan that was used to pay for Croatian embassies abroad, a court in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, said.<\/p>\n

Sanader\u00a0<\/span>will have to pay the state back for the amounts he took in bribes, but he will not have to go jail as he already served time in a previous sentence and detention period.<\/p>\n

His lawyer, Jadranka Slokovic, said he would appeal the verdict.<\/p>\n

\n
\n\n\n\n\n
<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\nSanader will not go to jail as he has already served time in other cases\u00a0<\/span>[Antonio Bronic\/Reuters]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Sanader was first sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2012 for taking bribes from the bank as well as pocketing millions of euros from Hungary’s energy giant MOL.<\/p>\n

But the sentence was later cut to eight-and-half years before the country’s top court quashed it in 2014, saying Sanader’s right to a fair trial had been violated.<\/p>\n

A retrial was ordered and the two cases were separated.<\/p>\n

Not guilty<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Sanader, who led the government as the prime minister from 2003 to 2009 and faces several other corruption cases, pleaded not guilty when the retrial opened in March.<\/p>\n

In a separate trial on Monday, the Zagreb court acquitted him on abuse of power charges over the sale of electricity from the state-run power firm HEP to two local companies at below-market prices.<\/p>\n

Sanader is the highest Croatian official to be charged with corruption since the country proclaimed independence from the former Yugoslavia in 1991.<\/p>\n

He steered Croatia into NATO<\/a> and to the doorstep of the European Union<\/a> in the 2000s.<\/p>\n

Tackling corruption was key for Croatia’s successful bid to join the EU in 2013.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ivo Sanader,\u00a0former prime minister of\u00a0Croatia,\u00a0has been sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for war profiteering during the country’s 1990s conflict. The 65-year-old\u00a0was on Monday found guilty of accepting nearly 500,000 euros ($558,500) in bribes from Austria’s Hypo Group Alpe Adria bank when he was a deputy foreign minister. The cash came in the form of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":19505,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19504\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}