Panel of judges chairman Pietro Spera said Prce was convicted because in March 2001, during an attempt to set up Croatian self-government in Bosnia, he had ordered that members of Bosnia's Croatian Defence Council (HVO) be sent home from barracks, which resulted in their not receiving salaries.
Spera said that Prce, in his capacity as federal defence minister, had had no authority to make a decision to that effect and that the decision had damaged members of HVO and the federal defence ministry, which is a criminal act.
Spera said the allegations that Prce and Curcic had undermined the military and defence power of Bosnia's Croat-Muslim entity had not been proved.
In March 2001, the two ordered that the training and movements of HVO members be called off and that federal insignia be removed from their uniforms, Spera said, but added that it had not been proven that by doing so they had undermined the Federation's defence and military power.
Prce's and Curcic's defence attorneys claimed during the trial that the former NATO-led Stabilisation Force had been the guarantor of Bosnia and Herzegovina's military and defence power and that therefore it could not have been undermined.
Prce has the right to appeal the sentence. He is already serving a five-year sentence which he was given in the Hercegovacka Banka embezzlement case after plea-bargaining with the State Court in September 2004. Today the panel of judges combined the two sentences into one six-year sentence.
This term includes the 15 months Prce spent in prison from September 2004 until today and the eight months he spent in custody from January of that year until the September sentencing in the Hercegovacka Banka case, Spora said, adding that Prce has to spend another four years in prison.
During the Croat self-government trial, Prce denied being guilty and claimed he had only acted on orders from Ante Jelavic, a former Croat member of Bosnia's State Presidency.
Jelavic is also indicted in the Croat self-government case but has been at large for the past five months, since being given a 10-year prison sentence in the Hercegovacka Banka case. He had been accused of embezzling funds which Croatia had been sending to Bosnian Croats as assistance through the Mostar-based bank.