July 31, 2025 – Former Croatian Prime Minister, Ivo Sanader, is a free man.
Fifteen years ago, while watching the news over lunch trying to improve my Croatian, there was a breaking news story that current Prime Minister Ivo Sanader had fled the country to Austria. I left the table and wrote my first viral story for the Canadian Google News website I was working for at the time. Fifteen years later, Sanader is once more a free man.
According to Jutarnji list, the decision was made at a council session on Thursday.
At a hearing held at the Sisak County Court on Thursday, it was decided that the former prime minister meets the conditions for early release from prison before serving his entire sentence.
His release was previously announced by his lawyer Čedo Prodanović.
As a reminder, Sanader was sentenced to a single prison sentence of 18 years, and previously used the benefits he has under the Act on the Execution of Prison Sentences.
He was finally convicted in three cases: for embezzling money from public companies in the Fimi Media case, for soliciting and accepting bribes in the Planinska case, and for transferring management rights over INA to the Hungarian MOL in exchange for bribes.
The former prime minister has so far spent almost nine and a half years behind bars, in detention or under verdicts. Early release in the Croatian prison system can be requested after half of the sentence has been served, and is most often granted after two-thirds of the sentence.
After several detentions and releases, Sanader has been in prison continuously since April 2019, when the Supreme Court increased his sentence for corruption in the Planinska case to six years in prison. In that case, the former owner of a meat industry and HDZ MP Stjepan Fiolić admitted that he had brought the former prime minister ten million kuna and one million euros in commissions.
In mid-October 2021, the highest court also partially upheld the verdict from the repeated proceedings in the Fimi media case, according to which the HDZ must pay a fine of 3.5 million kuna for siphoning money from state institutions and companies, while Sanader’s sentence was reduced from eight to seven years in prison, along with the return of illegal benefits.
At the end of October 2021, the Supreme Court upheld the first-instance verdict in which Sanader was sentenced to six years for accepting a bribe from the head of Hungarian MOL Zsolt Hernadi, while the unavailable Hernadi was sentenced to two years in prison.
In a series of long-running proceedings, Sanader was acquitted in a retrial in October last year of charges of war profiteering in the Hypo affair, for which he had been convicted twice in previous proceedings.
Another acquittal for Sanader, which acquitted him, together with entrepreneur Robert Ježić, of selling cheap electricity to Ježić’s Dioki to the detriment of HEP, was confirmed by the highest court in mid-November 2021.
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