Croatia and neighbouring Slovenia have solved the last major bilateral dispute blocking Zagreb's EU entry talks - cross-border banking access, Slovenia's Prime Minister Borut Pahor said on Thursday. "We broke the last really big problem. We found a solution for it," he told a news conference. It involved access for Slovenia's largest bank, Nova Ljubljanska Banka (NLB), to the Croatian market.
Pahor said the Croatian government had confirmed it was ready to continue talks about NLB as part of the former Yugoslav states' succession negotiations led by the Basel-based Bank of International Settlements (BIS), as Slovenia demanded. The Croatian government confirmed the agreement.
"Finance Minister Ivan Suker will send a letter to the BIS about our intention to carry on talks under its auspices," Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor told the cabinet. "The letter is also agreed with our central bank. We're on track to find a solution to a problem that no one before managed to solve." Slovenia said in June Croatia would not be able to conclude its membership talks, started in 2005, until it opened its market to NLB. Pahor and Kosor met in July and said a solution would be found within three months.
The Croatian central bank said earlier this year it would grant a licence to NLB only after the Croatian depositors of its predecessor, the now-defunct Ljubljanska Banka (LB), were reimbursed. LB failed to return some 172 million euros ($242 million) of deposits Croatian citizens held at LB's Croatian unit before the 1991 break-up of Yugoslavia. Slovenia blocked Croatia's EU bid for most of 2009 over a border dispute, until the two agreed to resort to international arbitration. An agreement has been ratified in both countries. Slovenia is the only former Yugoslav state to have joined the EU and apart from Croatia none of the others has opened EU membership talks.