Željko Kerum

Željko Kerum (born September 25, 1960) is a Croatian entrepreneur and politician.^[1] He ran for mayor of Split, Croatia in May 2009 and won 58.4% of the vote. He is also the owner of the Croatian supermarket chain Kerum.

Kerum was born in the village of Ogorje (part of Muć) in the Dalmatian hinterland. He graduated from the Technical High School in Split, Croatia in 1978. In 1981 he got his first job in the Split construction company Melioracija spending a year in Iraq working on military bases. He founded the company Kerum in 1989, opening his first convenience store in 1990. Six years later he opened his first supermarket in the Lora neighborhood of Split. In 2003 he bought the Diokom industrial facilities (ex-Jugoplastika) and in 2007 he opened the Joker Shopping Mall, the largest in Dalmatia.^[2]

In the first round of the 2009 elections for mayor of Split, Kerum (independent) won 40.21% of the popular vote, while his closest rival Ranko Ostojić (SDP) won 34.72%.^[3] On May 31, he won 58.42% of the vote, making him the incumbent mayor of Split.^[4]

In September 2009 there was a scandal in Croatia surrounding Kerum, because of his controversial quotes on the TV show Nedjeljom u 2 on national television channel HRT, where he said that "Serbs and Montenegrins are no good nor can't do anything good." This was followed by words that are referred as hate speech by many politicians around Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro. He said he would never let a Serb marry his daughter, into his family. He also said that 70% of the journalists in Croatia were in fact Yugoslavs, without a home (country), thus bringing so much misinformation, he had concluded this on the basis of surnames.

The public also resents Kerum because of his value inconsistency: although in his political programme he presented himself as a supporter of traditional values and a conservative world view, by divorce and extramarital affairs he is considered to have violated the principles that he espoused.^[5]

On January 16, 2011 the citizens of Split, on the initiative of an informal group of citizens gathered on Facebook, protested at the Prva voda beach on the park mountain Marjan in Split against a change of city urban planning regulation that allowed construction of restaurants and bars in the beach area. On this beach a company owned by his mistress Fani Horvat plans to build such an object, with the destruction of protected wood area. This scandal was also publicly perceived as a nepotistic and clientelistic favouring of his own interests.^[6] Kerum also caused notable controversy in split when he proposed to build a 40 meter tall statue of christ the redeemer.

Kerum has owned expensive cars including a Hummer, a Mercedes S500, a BMW 7, a Maybach 62, a Ferrari F430, and a Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano.^[7][8][9] His Cessna Citation X, a business jet worth approximately US$ 17 million, is the most expensive privately owned aircraft in Croatia.^[10]

In 2011, he became a candidate in the Croatian parliamentary election, 2011 on the electoral list of the Croatian Democratic Union.^[11]

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