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The Regions This Week
June 22, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 7
Southeast Europe
The temporary creditors’ council unanimously
approved the draft debt-for-equity settlement deal for Croatia’s Agrokor. Croatia’s largest com- pany, which employs around 60,000 people in the region, is undergoing restructuring after a debt crisis pushed it to the brink of collapse last year.
Around 4,000 people protested in the Romanian capital Bucharest against recently adopted changes to criminal legislation which have been often criticised for weakening the country’s anticorruption fight. A few protesters and a German journalist were detained by the police.
Italian firearms manufacturer Beretta is interested in cooperating with Serbian defence sector companies, its owner Frank Beretta’s said during a visit to Belgrade. Serbia is looking to expand its defence sector and hike exports.
US-based mobile marketing company Leanplum acquired Bulgarian start-up Connecto, which provides artificial intelligence (AI) powered conversational marketing. The deal will fuel innovation in AI, machine learning, natural language processing, and advanced algorithms, Leanplum said.
Turkish warplanes kept up their pre-election bombardment of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants as part of a counterterrorism operation in northern Iraq. Military officials spoke of 10 militants being neutralised in the latest attack.
A €100mn investment programme will be launched in Albania by the EU and EBRD to support tourist areas in the country. Financing will be allocated to help small tourism businesses, EBRD vice president Alain Pilloux said.
Slovenian energy firm Petrol Group adopted an ambitious five-year strategy, which lays
the foundations for the Petrol Group's business operations until 2022. Petrol aims to raise sales revenue to over €5bn by the end of the period.
A Bosnian court refused to extradite Zdravko Mamic, once the most powerful man in Croatian football. The former Dinamo Zagreb chief execu- tive has been convicted of fraud by a Zagreb court.
Bulgaria has some issues in terms of its central bank’s independence and needs to take steps to change that, according to European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis. It is clear that the law on central bank must be changed, the commissioner told Bulgarian National Radio.
Kosovo’s jobless rate fell to 26.5% in the first quarter of 2018 from 30.6% in the previous quarter, according to the labour force study released by the statistics agency. Pristina has drawn up plans to tackle the country’s extremely high youth unemployment.
A Moldovan court failed to validate the mayoral elections in the capital Chisinau. The court said pro-EU opposition leader Andrei Nastase, who won the election, broke the rules by issuing a video urging people to vote on June 3, the day of the second ballot.
The specialised prosecution indicted two former heads of Montenegro’s biggest telecoms opera- tor, Crnogorski Telekom, for abuse of office. After years of investigations, the two former managers were accused of participating in bribery, getting €2.3mn for themselves and other company repre- sentatives in the privatisation process.
56.52% of Bosnian citizens want to join the EU,
showed a poll by the Directorate for European Integration. Sarajevo applied to join the bloc in 2015.