City of Zagreb was ordered by the Commissioner for Information, Ms Anamarija Musa, to surrender to public complete information on payments to attorneys and legal offices in the period from 2012 – 2016.
But it seems that the City complained to the High Administrative Court against her decision. The Commissioner, acting on the request by a Zagreb entrepreneur Hrvoje Šimić, decided that the city should surrender all information contained in a document titled “payments and expenditures by business provider”. But the City claims the Commissioner misunderstood the nature of information contained in the document,. According to the City, this document does not contain information on total payments to attorneys, as Line 24 of the city budget is used for payments of all intellectual services. On the other hand, if the City succeeds in any given legal action, legal fees are recovered from the other side but registered on other budget lines. So the City claims that revealing only one set of data would paint an incomplete picture. However, for a full comparison it would be, according to the City Administration, necessary to summarize each individual file. And that would, in effect, be a new information and would not fall under public disclosure requirements.
The City previously claimed that this information is confidential, but the Commissioner did not agree with that and had ordered the City to surrender the data. According to Hina news agency, in 2012 the City of Zagreb paid its attorneys a total of Kn 8.2 million. This rose up to Kn 10.4 million in 2014, and Kn 8.5 million in 2015. Apparently, in 2016 and 2017, this will be a little less. Data show that in the first four months of 2017 “attorneys and offices” were paid a total of Kn. 1.92 million.
In this period, the City was represented, among others, by Hanžeković and Partners, the biggest law offices in the country, and Mađarić and Lui, Sučević and Partners, Leko and Partners, Frane Letica and Dalija Orešković, Krešimir Krsnik and Anita Hukelj.
Comment: it might be worth remembering that Mr Hanžeković acted as Mr Bandić’s attorney in 2015 and posted a record bail of Kn 15 million (EUR 2 million) for Mr Bandić’s release.