The reason is a recently adopted law.
The Law on Annulment of Loan Agreements Signed with Creditors Unauthorized in Croatia, which was unanimously approved in Parliament last week, on the last day of the session before the summer break, will be challenged in court by Raiffeisen Bank (RBA). According to Austrian media, Raiffeisen Bank is preparing a lawsuit against Croatia which will be filed with the Constitutional Court, reports Index.hr on 19 July 2017.
The law was supposed to finally solve the problems of debtors who took out loans from RBA and other building societies. The bill was proposed by independent Member of Parliament Marin Škibola, and the government supported it only after he voted for HDZ’s Gordan Jandroković as the new Speaker of Parliament. The goal of the law was to protect debtors of the RBA building society which gave loans to Croatian citizens under suspicious circumstances.
The RBA building society’s business operations in Croatia have been under sharp criticism for years. The new law enables people who took out problematic loans to file lawsuits in order to declare them invalid.
Michael Spitzer, the chief coordinator of Raiffeisen Bank’s business in Croatia, told Kleine Zeitung that he had been in intense discussions with “Croatian politicians and legal experts” in recent days and that he was “firmly convinced that this law is unconstitutional.” He announced that the bank would file a lawsuit with the Constitutional Court as early as this month.
The head of Raiffeisen Bank in Croatia also believes that his bank is “well prepared” for possible lawsuits which have been enabled by the law, but Kleine Zeitung points out that it will be difficult for the bank to deal with almost 3,000 potential claims, since that is the number of loans which have been given to citizens of Croatia via the problematic RBA building society.
