Addressing a parliamentary commission in charge of examining the privatisation of companies in Ljubljana on Wednesday, Kranjec said that last year's stress test for banks in the European Union showed that the NLB needed an infusion of additional capital.
The stress test assessed banks' resilience to possible new financial crises.
The governor said that a new stress test, which would be published by the relevant EU regulator in February, would be more stringent and that two leading Slovenian banks were covered by that assessment.
He said that the recapitalisation should be carried out through the injection of fresh capital rather than by long-term loans, irrespectively of whether additional capital would be provided from the state budget or by foreign investors.
According to recent media reports, the NLB loss piled up to EUR 185 million in 2010, which was ascribed to higher loan loss provisions and to the write-off of bad loans.
Apart from the NLB, other banks with losses in Slovenia in 2010 were the Hypo Banka, KD, Bawag and Sparkasse. On the other hand, Unicredit, NKBM and Abanka made profits on the Slovenian market last year, the media reported on Monday.
The NLB accounts for a 30-percent share on the Slovenian financial market.
Given that the Slovenian government holds a majority in that bank, it has recently decided on the recapitalisation of that financial institution in two rounds, in February and March.
In early February, the bank's supervisory board is expected to decide on the price of shares upon equity increase.
The government is negotiating with the Belgian KBC group, the second largest share-holder in the NLB, about recapitalisation models.