BRIEF NEWS BULLETIN IN ENGLISH NO. 3149

HR-CONFLICTS-FILMS-ATHLETES-Politika BRIEF NEWS BULLETIN IN ENGLISH NO. 3149 MINISTER PETROVIC ON RETURN OF CROATIAN EMIGRANTSZAGREB, Jan 17 (Hina) - A monthly inflow of money from abroad to accounts opened by Croatian retired persons with Croatian banks after they had earned pensions in foreign countries had doubled in 1998. The monthly influx of 'foreign pensions' was 139.9 million kuna (approximately US$22.5 million) in 1998, while it had amounted to 65.7 kuna (US$10.5 million) in 1997. Most of remittances were sent from Germany and other western European countries where Croats used to go to work for twenty or thirty years ("guest-workers"). Croatian Minister of Return and Immigration, Marijan Petrovic, told Hina recently that the number of those who had returned to Croatia after being granted a pension abroad had totalled 80,000 up to now. Petrovic added that their families had come back with those retirees, so that a number of the returnees could be much higher. According to stati