UN Commission on International Trade Law

On his first visit to Croatia in several years, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he and Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic had agreed on the need to resolve the thorny dispute over ownership of the Croatian energy company INA.

"I came to change this unnatural situation and return our relations to the normal track," Orban told the press conference on Monday.

With war still ongoing in Syria, plans for Croatian energy company INA to regain control over the gas and oil fields it partly owns in the country are viewed with some doubt by a leading expert.

Former general director of INA Davor Stern told BIRN that it is hard to say if regaining control over the fields is physically possible.

Croatia's planned purchase of the shares of the national energy company INA from the Hungarian energy company MOL is bound to increase Croatia's public debt, an economic analyst told BIRN.

Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said on Christmas Eve that purchasing MOL's share of INA - 49.1 per cent of the shares - can be done without enlarging the public debt.