By January 16, Slovenia must adopt an action plan to execute the ruling from Strasbourg, followed by legislative measures that will enable the return of foreign currency deposits in LB's former Zagreb and Sarajevo branches, Ana Polak Petric was quoted as saying in Monday's Dnevnik daily.
She said only the outlines of the payment model existed for now and that payments should not be expected this year. She said the ruling did not state that payments should begin in mid-2015, only that Slovenia establish a repayment mechanism "so that this process could begin and it will last a number of year."
She said that Slovenia must reimburse LB's former clients in the former Yugoslav republics just as it reimbursed those on Slovenia 20 years ago. There are about 300,000 people to reimburse and the amount totals EUR 250 million.
A task force led by the Slovenian Finance Ministry will determine the interest rates and anyone who thinks they are entitled to the reimbursement under the ECHR ruling will have to prove "that they had savings in a Ljubljanska Banka branch and that they still own those savings," Polak Petric said.
She said the ruling applied only to clients in LB's former Zagreb and Sarajevo branches, specifically those who had not been reimbursed in Croatia or Bosnia and Herzegovina.
As for the number of clients and how it would be verified if they had been reimbursed, she said the records for the Zagreb branch were "correct" and that Slovenia would have to cooperate with the authorities in Sarajevo concerning that branch.
She said Slovenia was considering how to collect Croatian companies' debts to LB's Zagreb branch. The ECHR ruling "is a new legal fact for us. If, under the ruling, we are responsible for assuming the obligation to pay out the foreign currency savings, then we are also responsible for Ljubljanska Banka's claims."
She said that by accepting the ruling and reimbursing the depositors, Slovenia was not renouncing its view on succession to the former Yugoslavia, namely that the reimbursement was a succession matter. The ruling "doesn't close the door to the final division" of the former Yugoslavia's debts because it "raises the question of whether an unfairly large part of the former Yugoslavia's debt has fallen on Slovenia," she said.
Polak Petric said she expected, following the formation of a new Bosnian government, a new meeting on succession, given that the last one was held in 2009. "Interests are different but the fact is that the succession treaty is an international legal obligation of all the successor states. The treaty should be honoured and executed. Slovenia is pointing to this also in the context of European Union integration because it is one of the most important treaties in this region."