By: Sara Kovač / Nova24tv
Let’s tell the truth: Sava is so indebted that no bank in the world is ready to grant it a loan. Hotels are in poor condition, working conditions for employees are even worse, and suppliers are chosen by keys not logical to anyone outside the company.
In recent days, we have been listening and reading about the crucial importance of Sava’s hotels, their transition to Hungarian ownership is supposed to be fatal not only for Sava, but for the entire tourism sector in our country. Portorož, Piran, Bled, Ptuj, Radence and Moravce will allegedly be swept away by floods if these hotel complexes do not continue to be led by the local mind with the exceptional managerial duo Klemen Boštjančič – Matej Narat at the helm.
The success of the management of Sava’s hotels is most eloquently evidenced by their catastrophic situation with Bled’s pearls, such as the Jadran, Trst, and Toplice at the forefront. These crystallise the state of mind in this largest Slovenian hotel company and the inefficiency of their management. They are not helped by state aid either: in 2020 they generated 55 million euros in turnover, of which 23 million euros came from tourist vouchers, and 10 million euros were received in state aid for the covid financing of fixed costs. So, 33 out of 55 million got donated out of the taxpayer’s pocket, but it still did not help. The company is so indebted that there are no banks in the world that would be willing to grant them the loans they need to finance current expenses, i.e., supplier accounts, salaries, etc. As a result, they are forced to borrow from non-banking institutions, and the conditions of borrowing are suicidal in such circumstances. The 8% interest rate is the price of money that only a life-threatening person is willing to pay – in our case a company.
Sava is being destroyed by banksters and bad managers
Behind the decisions that have brought society into this impossible situation are always the people who have the power to make decisions. Sava is indeed carrying a dowry of failed tycoon privatisations, and its recent history is in the hands of the management duo Klemen Boštjančič and Matej Narat. Old Adria employees can say about Boštjančič that he is one of the worst directors of Adria in its history, who made an important contribution to its bitter end. Even more interesting and better known is the history of Matej Narat. He is a long-time banker who became a hotelier because he was practically expelled from banking. Specifically, in 2010 the Bank of Slovenia did not grant him a license to manage A banka, then the third largest bank in Slovenia. The reason for this is his role in granting loans in 2002-2009, when as a member of the NLB Management Board he was directly responsible for operations with large companies. During this period, a banking hole was created, which was then financed by the taxpayers, and none of the key decision-makers were responsible for it. On the contrary, Narat was in the team of the President of the Management Board Marjan Kramar, who paid around one million for his work performance when he left. The Bank of Slovenia does not grant a license due to activities and transactions concluded by a candidate for a member of the Banking Management Board, which may jeopardise the Bank’s operations.
As a result of one of these loans, Narat was also sentenced in November 2020 to six months of probation. The court convicted him because, as a member of the NLB Management Board, he abused his position in granting a loan to Simona Dimic, the head of the cabinet of the then Prime Minister Borut Pahor. The Irangate affair, however, was much larger. In 2009 and 2010, Iranian companies made a total of 1 billion dollars in remittances through the NLB, in grave violation of international sanctions against Iran over the development of nuclear weapons. In those years, Matej Narat was the director of international business at NLB. With such a burden, he could not stay in banking, so he sought refuge in Sava JSC, and the modus operandi is like that in NLB: the bill for failed decisions is ultimately paid by taxpayers. Of course, a person with such a controversial business past cannot exist in a directorial position without the support of influential networks that can assert their partial interests through such a weak director. Recently, Borut Jamnik from Modra zavarovalnica came to the aid of the good soldier Narat, who announced in the style of a great saviour that he was able and ready to buy Yok’s share of Sava. Narat and Jamnik are old allies, dating back to their youth when they were members of YES – the Association of Young Entrepreneurs. Jamnik is considered a covert SD cadre, and Dimič, for whom Narat was convicted, as well, and we can conclude that Narat is kept alive by the ‘old boys’ from Kučan’s forum. Petrič’s Delo writes hymns about Jamnik’s Robin Hood offer these days, and Stojan Petrič was a member of the NLB’s Supervisory Board during Narat’s time and the period of Iranian money laundering. The assumption that the boys were not aware of the violation of international law before they allowed Iranian work in our largest bank is, of course, naïve. Equally naïve is the assumption that the boys did this out of selfless help to the impoverished Iranian people. Of those billion dollars, a lot of millions ended up in home pockets as well, and it is not that hard to figure out who made it all possible.
The prosecution and the judiciary should deal with Narat
A legally binding conviction for certain criminal offenses is an obstacle to membership in a management or supervisory body already according to the general corporate rules found in the Companies Act. Nevertheless, Narat remains a member of the Management Board of Sava JSC. How is this possible? By “controlling” the house union or at least the key workers’ representatives. Matej Narat is a member of the Management Board – an employee representative and this is used as a kind of detour to ignore the law, which is a common modus operandi for Narat. However, it is harmful for the company, and for the trade union and other forms of workers’ organisation it is downright shameful: how can a failed banker, legally convicted of granting loans outside the rules, represent workers in the administration? This shows the perversion of corporate culture in Sava, where even the union was subordinated to its own interests.
There really is interest behind the big words about pearls and the national interest. However, this is not national, but the interest of the current administration, which wants to stay in the saddle and continue to manage the company’s resources in a way that they and their comrades benefit as much as possible. If we cannot clean this Augean barn ourselves, let strangers clean it. Moravec and Bled cannot be loaded on a truck and taken away, we prefer to see well-kept hotels rather than socialist “home-owned” shacks. And the prosecutor’s office, the police and the judiciary should deal with Narat – once and for all.