October 12 (SeeNews) - Ivica Todoric, owner of Croatia's food-to-retail concern Agrokor, said on Thursday that his team and he have found several billion kuna worth of inaccuracies in Agrokor's financial statements for 2015 and 2016 audited at the request of the special administration of the indebted concern.
"Someone obviously wants to depreciate Agrokor with the aim of stealing a huge amount of money. Once again I want to emphasize: the figures issued by Agrokor's extraordinary administration are not accurate!", Todoric wrote on his personal blog referring to the results of an audit of the concern's consolidated financial statements conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) and released by Agrokor's extraordinary administration earlier this week.
Todoric said that he will go into detail soon, adding that "much of the financial report was done incorrectly and illegally".
Agrokor receiver, Ante Ramljak, said earlier this week that he has filed criminal charges against the management of the concern believed to be responsible for the huge discrepancies that PwC found in the financial statements of Croatia's largest privately-held company. He disclosed no names but said the situation is hardest on Todoric.
Ramljak explained that the reported capital of the Agrokor Group has been cut by 10.5 billion kuna ($1.7 billion/1.4 billion euro) for 2015, or by a total of 22.1 billion kuna when the results for 2016 are included. Additionally, according to the results of the audit, total liabilities stood at 56.3 billion kuna at the end of 2016, exceeding the concern's consolidated assets by 14.5 billion kuna.
Todoric, however, denied these figures and in his blog recalled a report by Deloitte & Touche, in which Agrokor's total liabilities were put at at 42 billion kuna.
Todoric said in a separate blog post earlier this week that he would report Ramljak to the state attorney's office, DORH, for allegedly operating outside of the law.
In April, Agrokor named PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as auditor of its 2016 financial statements after preliminary probes revealed that potential accounting errors might have been committed.
Agrokor has been in financial turmoil since January when Moody's downgraded its corporate family rating on Croatia's largest privately held company. Following Moody's decision, Agrokor pulled out of a syndicated loan deal it had struck with several international lenders, which sent the price of its bonds on international markets into a downward spiral.
In April, the Croatian parliament adopted a law allowing the government to appoint temporary administrators in companies of systemic importance to lead a restructuring process at the request of the companies' creditors or the debtors themselves. Todoric was stripped of his managerial rights under the law popularly known as Lex Agrokor but remains owner of the concern.