THE SEAT OF THE SRPSKA BANKA on the corner of Jurisiceva and Petrinjska streets in Zagreb is nowadays the administrative building of the Hrvatska postanska banka (Croatian Postal Bank) "The Srpska banka was founded in Zagreb in 1895 and the painstaking life's work of our grandfathers was invested into it. This labour was robbed first in the name of Croatian statehood by Ante Pavelic, and after him in the name of creating socialism by Josip Broz (Tito). Tudjman and Milosevic gave our remaining property to their associates. The current authorities are trying to sell that property to foreigners for a pittance."

The cited text is part of the introduction to the Srpska banka web site, once a powerful pre-war financial institution in Croatia, on whose tradition, according to Milorad Pupovac, the president of the Serbian National Council, a future bank of the Serbian community in Croatia will draw, the founding of which was announced in Zagreb some ten days ago. Although the Srpska banka was forcefully shut down and its property robbed with the arrival of the Ustasha regime to power in Croatia in 1941, its former owners, more precisely their descendants, have founded an association of Srpska banka owners in the United States, registered a list of stockholders and chosen a management bodies and a board of directors of the bank based in Chicago. At its helm is Mihailo Saskijevic, a retired professor from Chicago, the descendant of one of the founders in the Srpska banka, who says that his mission is to renew the operations of the Srpska banka in Zagreb and that he too is involved in the project that was recently announced by leaders of the Serbian National Council.

That is why Pupovac's banking operation, besides an economic one, could also take on a political aspect and prompt questions related to the short, but very dark, period of Croatian history from 1941 to 1945, when the Ustasha authorities forcefully shut down the Srpska banka, and transferred its valuable real estate to the Postanska stedionica (Postal Savings Bank), now the Hrvatska postanska banka. In a telephone interview, Saskijevic told Nacional that the Srpska banka has property in Croatia estimated at about USD 100 million. The bank had been the owner of the building on the corner of Petrinjska and Jurisiceva streets, near Ban Jelacic square, now housing the seat of the Hrvatska postanska banka, it owned the hotels Lapad and Imperial in Dubrovnik, and the Lapad and Sumartin bathing areas. The Srpska banka was also the owner of attractive buildings on the Split waterfront now housing offices of T-HT (T-Croatian Telecom).

Saskijevic claims that this real estate belongs to the stockholders of the Srpska banka, registered in the USA. He said, however, that they were not interested in the money. "Our property was robbed in the most shameful way. It was seized by Pavelic, and Tudjman's regime used the law on the restoration of only that property seized after 1945 to make sure that it is never restored to us. We are interested only in honour, and that will be defended if the words Srpska banka are written in Cyrillic on the bank's building in Jurisiceva street."

Milorad Pupovac, the initiator of the idea to create a new Serbian bank, was unwilling to reveal the details of the new banking project, nor the people working on it. He would confirm only that the preparations were being led by himself and his associates, that a part of the future stockholders would be from abroad, but that he could say no more than what was published in the press some ten days ago. And it had been said then that Serbian institutions in Croatia had launched the establishment of their own commercial bank that would work on the economic revival of returnee areas. The formal exponents of the project are the Serbian National Council, the Privrednik Savings and Credit Cooperative (Stedno-kreditna zadruga Privrednik) and the Privrednik Serbian Economic Association (Srpsko gospodarsko drustvo Privrednik) in Croatia and it is based on the transformation of the existing savings and credit cooperative into the bank of the Serbian community in Croatia. The new bank of the Serbian community would be a development-oriented bank, and as such the first financial institution of that kind in Croatia since World War II.