Ljubljana Bank

Ljubljana – The newspaper Delo says in Friday’s front-page commentary that Slovenia’s lost battles at the European Court of Justice are a defeat of the country as a whole, especially its diplomacy, politicians and legal experts.

Slovenia's money-laundering office has opened an investigation into claims by opposition parties that the country's biggest state-owned bank, Nova Ljubljanska Banka (NLB), may have laundered nearly €1bn from Iran between 2008 and 2010, breaking an international embargo and failing to enforce rules on the financing of terrorism.

In the corridor of the Zagreb office of Ljubljanska Banka on Wednesday, a crowd of mostly elderly people from all over Croatia waited to apply for the return of foreign account savings that they deposited more than 24 years ago.

Former clients of Ljubljanska Banka, which closed its operations in all the other Yugoslav countries in 1991 without repaying the savings of some 300,000 people outside Slovenia, told BIRN that they have still not been reimbursed despite a European Court of Human Rights ruling last year.