Speaking on Croatian Radio, Mesic said the State Prosecutor's Office, the judiciary, the police, customs and the government's agencies, notably financial ones, had set up a task force and discovered many accounts and names.
"Now a step forward has to be made, the money has to be traced and what was done with it has to be established, and then those responsible will be prosecuted," Mesic said, adding that like the majority in Croatia and the Croatian diaspora he too had been surprised to find out that there was about a hundred such accounts and not just two or three as initially thought.
Asked if the investigation also covered Vladimir Zagorec, a retired general recently accused in court of war profiteering, the president said that everyone who was a suspect was being investigated. He said that once the investigation was over he might convene a government session to brief them about the outcome.
Mesic advocated that parliament should adopt by consensus a bill moved by the opposition Social Democratic Party (SDP) under which there would be no statute of limitations for war profiteering, "because it is in everyone's interest that the truth be established".
The president also commented on the case of Branimir Glavas, an independent MP who has been on a hunger strike for a month now while in detention, where he has been placed on suspicion of war crimes committed against civilians in 1991.
Mesic said Glavas's accountability should be determined by an independent judiciary which did not yield to any pressure, including the suspect's hunger strike.
Asked to comment on accusations of fraud at intra-party elections levelled at the ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), Mesic said the question how much those accusations were founded was justified. "Everyone will ask why so many years had to pass before this issue was raised, why this has been brought up only after an intra-party quarrel, why raise issues which it is nearly impossible to establish now given that the ballots are gone."
Mesic said that the HDZ leader, Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, "should say more about this," for the sake of the public, confidence in political parties and their functioning.
Asked what would have happened had Ivic Pasalic and not Sanader won the HDZ elections, the president said the prime minister now would be Ivica Racan and the government led by his SDP.
Mesic confirmed that yesterday he met with two members of Bosnia and Herzegovina's state Presidency, Zeljko Komsic and Haris Silajdzic, but dismissed claims that the meeting was secret.
"I recently met the Presidency's third member in Montenegro so I decided to meet the other two as well," Mesic said, adding that a friend had invited him to the meeting and that the brief talks covered the situation in Bosnia, the need to upgrade the Dayton peace agreement and the need that the state government start functioning as soon as possible.
The Bosnian Serb entity's radio and television reported that the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats party strongly criticised the meeting.
Mesic's office said in a press release that he met the chairman of Bosnia's rotating state Presidency, Nebojsa Radmanovic, a member of the party, in Montenegro on November 15-16.