The District Court in Ljubljana has ruled in favor of the Croatian prosecutor in the first case after several years of unfreezing the lawsuit of former depositors of Ljubljanska Banka. A Croatian citizen, a depositor of LB, demanded the payment of a foreign currency deposit of 1,430 US dollars (approximately one thousand euros) in the proceedings before the Ljubljana court.
According to her lawyer Pavel Pense, the court recognized the Croatian prosecutor’s right to the payment of the principal of the savings, while rejecting the request for interest that had already been recorded in the savings book. This was the first trial against the former Ljubljanska Bank since the Slovenian Constitutional Court unblocked the depositors’ cases against that bank before Slovenian courts in December of last year. According to previously published information, in accordance with the decision of the Constitutional Court, trials will continue in Slovenian courts in about 140 cases, mostly involving Croatian foreign currency depositors of the former Ljubljanska Bank, while about 20 percent of the lawsuits are from depositors from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Approximately 132,000 former depositors of the former LB branch in Zagreb, along with interest from LB, are claiming more than 172 million euros. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, about 165,000 former depositors of the LB branch in Sarajevo are claiming around 90 million euros. The issue of guarantees for old foreign currency savings has still not been resolved among the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, and Slovenia insists that the issue of old foreign currency deposits should be resolved within the framework of the succession of the former state, namely through negotiations under the auspices of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel. (H)
