ZAGREB: The longtime head of Croatia’s Olympic Committee, Zlatko Matesa, resigned on Thursday amid corruption allegations at the country’s ski federation, which triggered a wider scandal across several sports.

His resignation came after anti-graft prosecutors opened an investigation in March into six people suspected of abuse of office and money laundering at the ski federation.

The alleged crimes cost the national ski federation nearly 30 million euros ($35 million), according to investigators.

A key suspect is the alpine ski team’s former director, Vedran Pavlek, whose tenure marked the tiny nation’s most successful era in the sport.

Under his leadership, siblings Janica and Ivica Kostelic won 10 Olympic medals for a country that has virtually no ski resorts.

Pavlek, who quit his role shortly before the official investigation was launched, was arrested in Kazakhstan in late April and faces a pending extradition request.

The scandal triggered probes into several other sports federations amid concerns about transparency into how public funds distributed by the national Olympic Committee were used.

On Thursday, Matesa said that although a formal process had found no Olympic funds had been used “unlawfully” at the ski body, he was quitting to allow for a “transparent clarification of all issues and circumstances within Croatian sport at all levels”.

“The irregularities may relate exclusively to the management of funds from other sources,” said the 76-year-old, who had led the Olympic Committee since 2002.

Conservative Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic had earlier condemned “all irregularities” within the country’s sports bodies, stressing that mechanisms for controlling the use of public sports funding “clearly need to be raised to a higher level”.

Tackling graft was a key criterion for Croatia’s 2013 membership of the European Union, but corruption remains endemic in the country.

Published in Dawn, May 22nd, 2026