We would like to point out that the member of the INA Management Board, Niko Dalić, did not advocate in any way for the appointment of Damir Škugor to the position of Director of Gas and Energy in INA, nor did he tell the President of the Management Board that this was the wish of the then Minister Ćorić. Damir Škugor was appointed in 2019 at the suggestion of Stjepan Nikolić, the responsible operational director of Refinery and Marketing at the time. Furthermore, Stjepan Nikolić was removed from his position in 2021, almost a year and a half after he appointed Damir Škugor to his team. Nikolić’s departure from INA has nothing to do with gas operations and the appointment of new directors, but rather with failures in the preparation of documentation for building permits in the company’s largest investment project – the upgrade of the Rijeka Oil Refinery.
It is also incorrect that INA carried out a major purge of directors in a short period of time, which contributed to the promotion of Mr. Škugor to the fourth decision-making level. The directors mentioned in this context left the company within a period of one year, and some of them did so at their own request.
Likewise, with the aim of distorting theses, the recording of an internal meeting with workers led by Gabriel Szabo, MOL Group’s Executive Vice President for Refineries and Marketing, is incorrectly placed in the context. In the aforementioned recording, he commented exclusively on the dismissal of the operations director Stjepan Nikolić and his subordinate director of the Rijeka Refinery upgrade project for the reasons already mentioned. It is true that the Government was also dissatisfied with the omissions in the preparation of the construction documentation, which is why the competent ministry at the Government session sent it back for additional refinement and did not object to this change – INA announced.