SLOVENE MEDIA ON STATEMENTS ABOUT LJUBLJANSKA BANKA

LJUBLJANA, Jan 10 (Hina) - Statements regarding Ljubljanska Banka Zagreb, i.e. the question of who should return the 150 million euros of foreign currency savings of 130,000 small depositors which have been blocked for 12 years, announce a new chill in relations between Slovenia and Croatia, Slovene media report on Friday. #L# In his response to the negative comments provoked in Croatia by his claim that Croatia had accepted the "territorial principle" in the payment of foreign currency savings back in 1991 and that the issue of Ljubljanska Banka Zagreb is a "succession issue", the head of the Slovene team for succession, Rudolf Gabrovec, only reiterated and elaborated his stands, formulating them even more aggressively in an interview with the Ljubljana-based daily "Delo" of Friday. "It was only with the Vienna agreement on succession of June 2001 that the guarantees of the former Yugoslav federation were defined as a succession issue. The agreement established the average date and day of the declaration of independence, without discussing the states' actions after that date," Gabrovec told "Delo". "We decided last year that we would therefore check all documents to establish the state of affairs on the day when the states declared their independence and the way in which they defined financial issues on their territory. The analysis on Croatia and the legal opinion that we adopted at the time are in line with those findings. It was only later that a report by international legal experts, prepared in the European Parliament, established that the federal guarantees should be included in the Vienna agreement on succession. "The issue in question is therefore not whether we have discovered something on time, but what is being divided and how, which is defined by the Vienna agreement," Gabrovec told the daily when asked why Slovenia had only now "discovered" the mentioned documents. Regardless of the fact that Croatia has not ratified the Vienna agreement on succession, "all citizens who on the day Croatia declared its independence had foreign currency deposits on Croatian territory were protected in the same way. The Republic of Croatia gave guarantees for every deposit and every depositor. The guarantees were not given to an institution or a bank," Gabrovec said. A former governor of the central Slovene bank, France Arhar, told Delo that Gabrovec's statement was "in line with the policy which Slovenia has advocated from the very beginning". "This is undoubtedly a matter of legal relations between the bank and the depositors, and with the establishment of the new state (Croatia), new legal relations came into force. Croatian citizens, who were given back their foreign currency savings and guarantees for those savings, now refer to the regress right and do not recognise the territorial principle," Arhar said. The Slovene agency STA last night quoted a commentary from today's issue of Maribor's "Vecer" daily which claims that Gabrovec's statement about Ljubljanska Banka Zagreb is not accidental. "It is obvious that the new team which this year came to power in Slovenia has decided to adopt a more aggressive approach regarding some persisting problems. Slovenia is facing important decisions regarding admission to NATO and the EU and the blocked foreign currency deposits demanded by Croatian and Bosnian depositors are not a good recommendation either for the domestic public or for Brussels," reads the commentary. STA also quotes a commentary from the business paper "Finance" which notes, among other things, that the latest political debate about Ljubljanska Banka will diminish the prospect of the hotel company "Terme Catez" of buying Croatia's "Suncani Hvar" hotel chain as well as the rating of other potential Slovene investors in Croatia. (hina) rml