Croatia ex-PM convicted of graft charges
Tuesday, 11 March 2014
Croatia's ex-prime minister Ivo Sanader was found guilty Tuesday of embezzling millions of euros in public funds while in power and sentenced to nine years in jail, his second graft conviction in two years. The two-year-long trial, which also found the the former ruling HDZ party guilty of the same charges, was labelled here as the most important corruption case since the former Yugoslav republic's 1991 independence. In 2012, Sanader was sentenced in another case to 10 years in prison for taking millions of euros in bribes from Hungarian energy giant MOL and a troubled Austrian bank.