Mladen BarišićJust how close the head of customs and, until recently, HDZ chief treasurer Mladen Barisic was to Nevenka Jurak, a woman who put together deals with state-owned firms worth millions, is best seen from their personal love & business soap opera. Nevenka Jurak was born on 24 January 1956 as Nevenka Jacmenica in the town of Sveti Kriz Zacretje, and started her relationship with her future husband Kresimir Jurak back in the mid 1970s, when she had enrolled as a marketing major in foreign trade at the Graduate School of Economics and Business. Besides her studies, in which she did not exactly excel and which dragged on for some time, she found employment as a liquidator in the construction company her father worked for, a cabinetmaker by trade.

While working at the company, back in the late 1970s, she met then 30-year-old customs clerk Mladen Barisic, a native of Sibenik, at a nearby café. Some say that it was love at first sight, but he was already spoken for. She went on to marry in 1979 with her long time boyfriend Kresimir Jurak. But although the two were now both in marriages, a great love burned between Mladen and Nevenka and the two embarked upon an extramarital relationship.

The blonde native of the Zagorje region who, as an only child is accustomed to getting whatever she wanted, captivated the perspective man from Sibenik who was, at one point, prepared to leave his wife and then young daughter for her. They had already agreed to seek divorces from both of their spouses, but he reneged on the deal before she could confess all to her husband. This hurt her considerably, and for a time they broke off the liaison. But only for a while. To make the absurdity all the greater, the two not only renewed their secret bond, but also started to meet as families, i.e. making family visits to each other in the company of their spouses, who had not even the faintest idea what was going on between the two. In the meantime, when the decision had been made to scrap the foreign trade course at the Graduate School of Economics and Business, she practically overnight managed to graduate after years of study. As the construction company her father had found her a job at went bust, she, again through an acquaintance, landed a job at what was then the economic-propaganda program on Croatian Television.

In the early 1990s, Nevenka Jurak, who had for long been unable to achieve a pregnancy, gave birth to her only daughter, naming her Arijana. What is interesting is that Mladen Barisic's daughter is named Adrijana. Whatever the case, soon after their daughter was born, Nevenka and her husband Kresimir, who was a craftsman, decided to open their own company, Model Promet, and she quit her job at Croatian Television. Their family friend and her lover Mladen Barisic helped them out even back then and found some jobs to make cabinets for Croatian Telecom and some other companies. But when business took a nosedive in the late 1990s, Nevenka completely withdrew her name from the company, which would up with tax debts, with its accounts blocked as a result. Mladen Barisic allegedly intervened once again to see the debt wind up in someone's office drawer until the statute of limitations had taken effect, while Nevenka Jurak's husband opened a new small business under the same name, registered as a trade. In the meantime Mladen Barisic's wife Katica died in 2000 of lung cancer. Nevenka Jurak and her husband were at the funeral, as was Ivo Sanader, who had by then become the leader of the HDZ.

Nevenka JurakAfter the death of his wife, Mladen Barisic insisted that Nevenka leave her husband Kresimir, which she did. In the meantime she had persuaded him to sell his family house in Vrapce and a 40-square metre apartment in Supetar, left to him by his late mother, and the apartment they owned jointly in Hrgovici, and used most of the proceeds to renovate a floor in her parent's house in Pescenice. When she told him she wanted a divorce he first went to live as a tenant, and then she returned him the favour by buying him the bachelor flat he now lives in. In spite of it all Kresimir Jurak today has only words of praise for his former wife. Around the time of the divorce, in January 2001, Nevenka Jurak set up her own company Fimi-media. She worked out of a small rented room across the way from the central bus station in Zagreb and was for four year's the company's sole employee, and would from time to time take on some girls for part time work through the student-service. At the time she was making just enough to cover overhead and wages. She did odd jobs for private companies and even got involved in printing business cards for a time.

Nacional has learned that even back then Mladen Barisic, then the assistant director of the Customs Directorate, set her up with some jobs with the Lipovica radiator factory where she organised something for convicts, the DI-OKI company and the Iločki podrumi winery. In their private lives Nevenka Jurak and Mladen Barisic, by then a senior advisor at the Finance Ministry, made public their relationship soon after his wife died, which deeply upset his only daughter Adrijana, who left her father's apartment in protest. He was in turn distressed to learn that his only child was in a relationship with a much older married man, Sibenik native Ante Despot, who was already a father himself. The two, however, quickly found a common interest and Ante Despot left his wife and child and married Barisic's daughter and they purchased an apartment in the building in which Zagreb Mayor Milan Bandic also has an apartment, right next to the building in which Mladen Barisic lives.

Several months ahead of the elections for Parliament in 2003 Nevenka Jurak signed up for membership in the HDZ, and was heard to have told her friends to do so too. She was so certain that the HDZ would win that she would often say, "You'll see when the HDZ takes power." With the consolidation of the HDZ reign and the appointment of Mladen Barisic in 2004 to the post of director of the Customs Administration came better days for the Fimi-media Company. A firm that had up to 2004 done some two hundred thousand euro worth of business a year and zero kuna in profits, barely covering overhead and the wages for one employee - Nevenka Jurak - saw a sudden hike in its turnover in 2005 to 1.2 million euro and profits of 200 thousand euro, when she took on a second employee besides herself. In 2006 her turnover grew to 3 million euro, with a half million euro in profits, in 2007 her to company did 7.3 million euro worth of business, with a million and a half euro in profits, and in 2008 her turnover was 6.7 million euro, and profits about a million and a half euro.

By 2008 she was employing 11 people. It is possible that her profits grew even more in 2009 when the entire scheme of which she was a part really took off. And so she became the participant of an operation of much greater scale than her agency, an operation that could bring down her friend Mladen Barisic, and his boss Ivo Sanader.