Background
Željko Kerum was born in the village of Ogorje (part of Muć) in the Dalmatian hinterland.
Željko 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.
He was mayor of Split, between 2009 and 2013, when he failed to qualify for the second round of elections. He also owned the supermarket chain Kerum until it folded in 2012. 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 at the time.
Not only Serbs, but also Montenegrins. And whoever is doing business with them will not make out Oklahoma".
Asked further by Stanković if he would accept a man of Serb ethnicity as a son-in-law, Kerum answered emphatically: "Number, never".
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. According to plans, on the proposed beach site a company owned by his mistress Fani Horvat planned to build such an object, with the destruction of protected wood area. The idea was perceived as a nepotistic venture and favouring of Kerum"s own interests instead of the city"son
In 2011, he became a candidate in the Croatian parliamentary election, 2011 on the electoral list of the Croatian Democratic Union.
In September 2009 during a live television interview on the Nedjeljom u 2 talk show that airs on the Croatian state broadcaster HRT 1, in response to host Aleksandar Stanković"s question if Serb businessmen are welcome in Croatia, Kerum answered: "If it was up to me I wouldn"t let them because Serbs never brought us anything good in the past and they won"t do it now. The news caused many in the media to point out the hypocrisy in his political image, where he has consistently presented himself as a supporter of traditional values and a conservative world view, but had been participating in an extramarital affair.