Speaking to the press after a parliament session on the occasion of Independence Day, Mesic said he had asked for an investigation into allegations of secret accounts when he was parliament speaker.
"I asked for clearing up what happened to the money that our emigrants had given for Croatia's defence and for establishing where was the money from our budget that had been deposited into accounts," Mesic said, adding that the existence of the accounts had been known but the transfers from them remained a mystery.
Mesic said the secret services and the State Prosecutor's Office had been instructed to solve the problem, but the answer had always been that banks did not want to reveal confidential information.
"Banks will never reveal a secret until criminal proceedings have been launched, and now is the opportunity to launch them and every bank will give the information."
Asked if Prime Minister Ivo Sanader and he had resolved the issue of whether the international embargo on the import of arms in the early 1990s had benefitted or damaged Croatia, Mesic said that "every idiot knows that it was a mistake to ban Croatia from defending itself". He added that his aide Budimir Loncar had never spoken in favour of the embargo and that he had defended Croatia's interests.