Owner of printing shop who put Ustasha coat of arms on Croatia jerseys reacts: It's madhouse now...

Photo: STUART FRANKLIN / AFP / Profimedia

An incredible scandal has broken out in Croatia, where the national team of this country played a European Football Championship match wearing jerseys with the Ustasha coat of arms, instead of the official one.

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Namely, the Croatian flag, which was sewn onto the jerseys during the EURO 2021 game, featured a checkerboard starting with a white instead of a red field - which is the difference between the coat of arms of the era of Ante Pavelic's NDH (Nazi-allied Independent State of Croatia) and the current official version.

The Croatian football association, NHS, announced that it would immediately investigate all the circumstances, and it turned out that the printing shop Sitotisak Decolor from Varažzin was responsible for printings on the jerseys.

Its owner, Damir Kumek, reacted to say that he was apologizing to everyone and was distancing himself, as well as that there was no intent behind the incident and that everything was just a mistake.

"It's a madhouse now. I can say that I wholeheartedly distance myself from this being done intentionally and from any insinuations in that sense. Neither did we intentionally print like that, nor did anyone ask us to. It is absolutely a matter of coincidence and a mistake," Kumek told Jutarnji List.

He was also contacted by the 24 Sata website, for which he said that it was his mistake during the vector processing of the image of the coat of arms.

"It was an unintentional mistake, exclusively mine, during the vector processing of the coat of arms. I made a mistake. I am a graphic artist and I deal with graphics, exclusively with that and nothing else. There is no connotation regarding this topic. I made a mistake," said the owner.

HNS: We will seek printing shop's accountability

Recting to this scandal, the NHS pointed out that it will demand the accountability of the printing shop, but also stressed that it was an unintentional mistake.

"All the printing on the sports equipment of the Croatian national team is done by the company Sitotisak Decolor, including the flags for individual matches. Unfortunately, an unintentional error occurred in the manual vector drawing and then in the printing of the Croatian flag ahead of the European Championship, which was not noticed at the time.

"The Croatian Football Association will demand responsibility of the company Sitotisak Decolor and internally discipline employees responsible for this unintentional mistake, for which we apologize to the public and to Croatia's fans. Certainly, the HNS rejects any thought that this would be a deliberate inversion of the Croatian coat of arms, which the Croatian national teams have been proudly representing around the world for years," the NHS said in a statement.

(Telegraf.rs)