The spokesman for the court, Igor Perisa, explained that the application of the new Bankruptcy Act had triggered off "an exceptionally high number" of bankruptcy motions.
Thus, from 1 September to 30 November, 12,282 motions were filed with commercial courts for launching "summary bankruptcy proceedings" plus 1,653 motions for launching bankruptcy actions. The corresponding period in 2014 saw 305 motions for summary bankruptcy and 458 motions for bankruptcy actions, Perisa said.
Statistics for the period from 1 January to 30 November 2015 show that a total of 2,135 bankruptcy proceedings were concluded in that period, and an additional 1,549 files were either rejected or suspended.
The new law envisages that the state-run Financial Agency (FINA) has to launch bankruptcy proceedings for any business whose bank accounts have been frozen for more than 120 days and the second prerequisite is the failure of the business to pay salaries for three months in a row.
The new law also regulates the sale of the bankruptcy estate in no more than five rounds within a year.
According to some estimates, the new law should sort out the situation with nearly 15,000 non-active companies that have no employees and that have had their accounts blocked for a long time.
By the spring of 2016, bankruptcy proceedings should be launched against some 19,000 companies with 8,838 employees and with outstanding debts in the amount of 19.8 billion kuna.
By mid-2015, 19,646 businesses had their accounts frozen for more than 120 days, and of them 15,091 were no-employee businesses, while the remainder, 4,555, had 10,139 workers on their payrolls.