Finance minister speaks at conference on tax policy

Finance Minister Marko Primorac said on Friday that the state's goal in punishing those who unjustifiably raised prices after the euro adoption was not to fill the budget, but rather to sanction unfair business practices.

Primorac today refuted claims about retailers and the government being at loggerheads over prices, and that there are more and more fines written due to rounding off by six or four cents.

He said that since the beginning of the process of introducing the euro, the government tried to conduct everything transparently.

Some enterprises took the law too flexibly, while the government tried to prevent unjustified price increases, said Primorac, while participating in a conference on the tax system at the Zagreb Faculty of Economics.

"We emphasized that the introduction of the euro would result in additional inflationary pressures. However, when looking at all or most other countries that introduced the euro, that additional effect should have only been between 0.2 and 0.4 percent," said the minister.

He added that the state inspectorate, tax and customs administration are doing everything they can to sanction and prevent such behaviour.

"It is a corrective instrument and it also a preventative instrument so that a message is sent to all those who wanted to take advantage of this situation. Not only did we not want that to happen but we also wanted to prohibit it," said the minister.

After all, it is prescribed by the law on the euro adoption and consumer protection, he added.

"This is something that the Law on Consumer Protection treats as an unfair business practice. If someone had done that before or afterwards, it might not have been considered an unfair business practice, but with the law on the introduction of the euro, we invoked the principle of prohibiting unjustified price increases, and unjustified price increases were identified in several enterprises or a particular group," says Primorac.