Croatia

Most Balkan countries showed a marked improvement in their ratings in the World Bank's latest "Doing Business" report, which measures 189 countries on the basis of regulations that either enhance or suppress business activities.

Macedonia remains the regional leader in terms of ease in doing business, placed at 30th place in the rankings, moving up one place.

Perica Adzic, a former member of the Croatian Defence Council, was jailed for four years for war crimes against wounded prisoners at an improvised medical unit in Zepce in 1993.

Bandic and the other suspects were remanded late on Tuesday evening after the judge agreed to a request from Croatia's Office for the Suppression of Corruption and Organised Crime, USKOK.

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Former Croatian Serb minister Milan Martic, who is serving a 35-year sentence for war crimes, wants to be moved from Estonia, where he claims that prison conditions are poor.

A witness said he saw the military policemen shoot the captive while Serb forces were retreating from the Croatian Army’s Operation Storm offensive in the Banovina area in August 1995.

Wreaths were laid in the coastal city to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the attack by the Yugoslav People’s Army and Montenegrin Territorial Defence forces which began an eight-month siege.

Croatian wartime officials accused former Yugoslav general Andrija Raseta of responsibility for atrocities in Vukovar in 1991 after he gave a controversial interview blaming Serb paramilitaries.

War victims’ associations commemorated the anniversary of the killings of 16 elderly Serbs in the Croatian villages of Varivode and Gosic in 1995 and urged the authorities to punish their murderers.

Retired general Karlo Gornisek told Zagreb county court on Friday that the notorious ‘Mercepovci' police unit, colloquially named after their alleged commander Mercep, a former interior ministry adviser, might not actually have been led by the defendant.

Croatia's State Office for State Property Management, DUUDI, on Wednesday published a report on the 56 biggest and most strategically valuable state companies and associations for the first half of 2014.

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