Peters & Peters acts for Zsolt Hernádi, Chairman and CEO of Hungarian oil and gas company MOL.

Mr Hernádi has been pursued by the Croatian authorities for over a decade in connection with an allegation that he offered a bribe to the former Prime Minister of Croatia, Dr Ivo Sanader, to enable MOL to obtain a substantial stake in INA (Croatia’s national oil and gas company) and gain management rights over INA.

A Red Notice was first published against Mr Hernádi in October 2013, just after Croatia had joined the EU. Over the next several years, member countries’ access to the Red Notice was blocked and reinstated multiple times due to concerns over the political circumstances surrounding the case, fair trial rights and the applicability of ne bis in idem. Following failed concerted consultations between the NCBs of Hungary and Croatia, the highly unusual case went on to be reviewed at all levels of INTERPOL’s hierarchy (as it then was), including INTERPOL’s Executive Committee and INTERPOL’s General Assembly, leading to the deletion of the Red Notice in November 2016.

The Red Notice was reinstated two years later after the NCB of Croatia successfully argued that the dispute had been resolved in its favour by virtue of a decision of the CJEU on the applicability of ne bis in idem. This was notwithstanding the fact in December 2016, an UNCITRAL arbitral tribunal had arrived at the “confident conclusion” that Croatia had failed to establish its bribery case, and a Hungarian court had denied Mr Hernádi’s extradition on the basis that his fair trial rights would be violated if he were to be surrendered to Croatia.

Since 2018, several developments have occurred that eventually turned the tide in our client’s favour: a second arbitral tribunal constituted under ICSID rules comprehensively rejected Croatia’s bribery case, Switzerland’s Federal Supreme Court refused Croatia’s request for revision of the UNCITRAL award, and a team of international trial monitors identified a plethora of fair trial violations in respect of Mr Hernádi’s year-long trial in absentia in Croatia, his conviction by the Zagreb County Court in December 2019 and the subsequent appellate proceedings before Croatia’s Supreme Court and Constitutional Court. These novel circumstances enabled Peters & Peters to demonstrate to the CCF that the applicable test for revision had been met and that retaining Mr Hernádi’s data would be incompatible with Articles 2(1) and 3 of INTERPOL’s Constitution and its data processing rules.

The case is highly significant and, to our knowledge, unprecedented in that it involves a finding of political motivation and abuse of INTERPOL’s channels by the CCF against an EU member state, raising very serious questions about the rule of law and the protection of human rights in Croatia.