ZAGREB, September 14, 2018 – The Croatian Banking Association (HUB) said on Friday bank bailout expenses over the past 25 years were estimated at 36.3 billion kuna, about three times less than recently mentioned in public.
HUB said in a press release a comparison of expenses of subsidies in agriculture and shipbuilding with bank bailout expenses which recently appeared in public was completely out of context.
Expenses of subsidies in agriculture and shipbuilding were decided by democratic governments every year over the past 25 years, while “bank bailout expenses appeared for a brief period in the 1990s, and they were imposed and unavoidable due to the depth of the losses inherited from socialist banks,” HUB said.
It added that this century “not one kuna of taxpayers’ money was spent on Croatian banks, although during the global crisis after 2008 that was a widespread practice.”
As for recent claims that over 100 billion kuna, including interest, was spent on bank bailouts, HUB said the actual expense was estimated at “about 36.3 billion kuna.”
Earlier this week, opposition MP Ivan Lovrinović said the highest amount of taxpayers’ money went to bail out banks and not, as claimed by the media, for subsidies in agriculture and shipbuilding. He said that over the past 10 years taxpayers spent 102.4 billion kuna on the banking sector, including 60 billion kuna for bailout and 42.4 billion kuna for unnecessarily paid interest, while 40 billion kuna went for agricultural and 32 billion kuna for shipbuilding subsidies.
