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Zagreb - The Croatian Parliament opened Thursday's session with discussion on consumer rights protection, with opposition parties criticising the government for failing to protect consumers in the case of CHF-indexed loans, while the ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) claimed the opposite.
"Consumer rights protection in Croatia is the worst in the EU," Marija Selak Raspudić (Bridge) said ahead of the discussion on the final bill on class action suits for the protection of collective interests and rights of consumers.
"When it comes to collective protection of consumer rights, I'm not interested in how EU directives are transposed into national law, but what is going on in practice, that is how the government protects consumer rights," she added,
As an example of how the government was avoiding to protect citizens, she said that the government refused to publish the agreements it had signed with the banks, as a result of which the banks abandoned further legal action.
"Did the Croatian government sacrifice the interests of CHF debtors to favour the banks?" Selak Raspudić asked.
Katarina Peović (Workers Front) also mentioned secret agreements between the government and the commercial banks, saying that the government was protecting foreign investors and capitalists.
Sandra Benčić (We Can) said: "The CHF loans case is not over yet. The Supreme Court has not issued its opinion yet, and the status of limitations on claims is running out in a month. We failed to provide people with adequate legal protection, but left them to the industry of debt collection agencies without any supervision."
Mišel Jakšić (Social Democratic Party) said that in addition to alignment with EU directives a wider debate and a greater turnaround were needed to protect consumers.
Vesna Vučemilović (Croatian Sovereignists) drew attention to the problem of high inflation, saying that the government was trying to do something about it this year while the whole last year it had done nothing to protect people from the greed and profiteering of some of the producers.
Miro Totgergeli (HDZ) said that the opposition's claims that the government was not looking after consumers were not true. "It was the CHF loans case that had a considerable impact on the preparation of the bill so that something similar would not happen again in the future," he said.
"The government looked after consumers both during the euro changeover and the time of rising energy prices. We are paying the cheapest electricity, natural gas, diesel and petrol in Europe," Totgergeli said.