If the investigation into Hercegovačka Bank is expanded and if the BiH justice system requests the arrest and extradition of former Croatian Member of Parliament Ljubo Ćesić Rojs, Nacional has learned from sources close to the Croatian justice system that the Croatian government will reject the request for his extradition but not the request that he be tried in Croatia.

Nacional received written confirmation of this from Assistant Justice Minister Zdravko Stojanović: Ćesić will not be extradited to the Bosnia Herzegovina justice system as he became a Croatian citizen on 31 December 1992. Pursuant to Article 9, paragraph 2 of the Constitution of the Republic of Croatia, Croatian citizens may not be extradited to other states. However, Stojanović claims that according to the provisions of Article 14 of the Croatian Criminal Justice Act, the criminal legislation of the Republic of Croatia is applied to all those citizens who committed criminal acts outside of the country’s territory.

Put more simply, at the request by BiH authorities to try Ćesić or any other Croatian citizen involved in the crimes committed in Hercegovačka Bank, the trial will be held in Croatia, with the logistical assistance of the BiH prosecutor and the BiH Federal police.

The recent arrest of the former HDZ BiH president Ante Jelavić, former Federation BiH Defense Minister Miroslav Prce and former director of Herzegovina Insurance Miroslav Rupčić in the Hercegovačka Bank case are not the only arrests which will be carried out at the order of the BiH Court.

“Hercegovačka Bank is not a case which we have been investigating for two years in isolation, it is a key indicator of criminal activities committed by those persons gathered in the so-called Hercegovina Holding which holds the company Croherc AG, Monitor, Hercegovina Insurance, Hercegovina Construction and Hercegovina Bank, through which all the Holding transactions were made. Jelavić, Prce and Rupčić were only one part of that circle, the remainder is in Croatia,” stated a high ranking BiH justice system official for Nacional.

Commenting on the newly arisen situation, Nacional’s source close to the representatives of the international community in BiH stated: “the Croatian government will have to show greater interest for cooperation uncovering the funneling of Croatian taxpayer money from Hercegovačka Bank into the pockets of high ranking HDZ officials in BiH. It is very likely that in the coming months, Croatia will seek assistance in trying the individuals involved in the affair or that HDZ officials who held very high state and party posts in the late 1990s will be called in to testify. Regional cooperation in the battle against all forms of crime is one of the key conditions of democratization of society in all the countries of Southeast Europe and a condition for accession into Euroatlantic associations. I believe that the new Croatian government will also respect these principles in the case of Hercegovačka Bank”.

Due to the extensive investigation surrounding the involvement of individuals in financial misappropriations, tax evasion and document forgeries, Ljubo Ćesić will certainly have to appear before the court, either as a witness or as the accused. Ćesić was one of the founders of the logistical centre of the Croatian Defense Council (HVO) in 1992 in Grude, the centre through which the Croatian taxpayer money was distributed on the orders of Tudjman and Šušak for the funding needs of the Herzegovinian front-state Herceg Bosna.

The peacetime bus driver on the Munich line began his stellar career rise in 1990 by driving the Croatian special forces to Plitvice. His homeland connections quickly brought him close to late Defense Minister Gojko Šušak who generously rewarded his loyalty in 1992 by appointing him as head of the HVO logistics centre in Grude. Ćesić later went on to found the construction company Monitor, which became the financial sponsor of the founding of all the other Herzegovinian companies united under Hercegovina Holding.

The idea of forming the construction company Monitor, better known in Croatia as the 66th road building regiment, arose in 1992 when the equipment, machinery and workers of several companies, the Boxite mines from Posušje and Široki Brijeg and Energoinvest, were brought together under the patronage of Ćesić and began blazing trails and building roads for the needs of HVO.

Ćesić formed the engineering unit which worked in Herzegovina until 1995, when it was transferred to Croatia, complete with machinery and two newly formed companies filled with the impoverished Herzegovinian men. In order to avoid having the engineering brigade become a part of the Defense Ministry of the BiH Federation under the Dayton legal terms, the company Monitor M from Grude was registered on 17 October 1995 at the High Court in Mostar under the registration number U/I-1282/95. Monitor M was registered as a citizen’s cultural association of the Croatian Community Herceg Bosna, and made a gift of the majority of the company’s resources.

In November 1996, court expert Ante Mišković and Milenko Obad drafted their elaborate on the value of the company Monitor M. The assessed value of the machinery and equipment at that time totaled 46,519,432 DEM, while virtually half of the assessed value of the company comprised one dump truck, six bulldozers, 10 backhoes, 19 loaders, 71 tippers, 23 rollers, 17 drilling machines, 58 semi-trailers, etc. for a grand total of 864 vehicles.

In the following years, Hercegovina Holding was formed. This company was in fact the criminal octopus which is now under investigation by the BiH justice system. Monitor M founded the company Hercegovina Construction d.o.o. centred in Posušje, and Hercegovačka Bank d.d. from Mostar. In January 1999, Hercegovina Construction founded Croherc AG d.o.o. as a company registered to trade petroleum products. The founder of Croherc AG, Hercegovina Construction, was under the control of Ljubo Ćesić, while Ante Jelavić and his associates were frequently mentioned as co-owners.

Croherc AG was under the control of General Ivan Medić, former federal Assistant Defense Minister responsible for finance, as well as for the money coming from Croatia. Croherc AG was one of the largest suppliers of oil products for the BiH market.

Following the signing of the Dayton Accord and the liberation operations ‘Storm’ and ‘Flash’, the company Monitor M, co-owner of all the companies within Hercegovina Holding, primarily dealt with laying asphalt in the backwoods of Hercegovina: building a road from the Croatian border to the village of Podprolog, the birthplace of Ante Jelavić, and a little road to the village Zmijavci, leading to the birthhome of Ivan Milas, former guard of the state seal of the Republic of Croatia. Up until 1996, the company’s director was Ante Jelavić, who was replaced by Ignjac Rakić in May of that year.

Over the past few years, Ljubo Ćesić has frequently been accused of being the main destructor in the implementation of the Dayton Accord on the Croatian side, for which the US put him on its undesirables list, considering that under his supervision in Hercegovina Holding, the company financed the creation of a third entity in BiH.

According to the available documents and bookkeeping records for the Defense Ministry from 1992 to 1999, the Croatian Defense Ministry accounted for a total of 5,893,852,236.59 kuna of its budget resources for the Croatian component of the BiH Federation. MORH also claims that twice that amount was transferred from Croatia to “Herceg Bosna” through the Finance Ministry.

It has been estimated that this money from the Finance Ministry was transferred to Herceg Bosna for the purposes of health care, infrastructure projects, education and welfare, according to MORH. The MORH resources filled the institutional budgets of the front state for several purposes: to pay out the HVO salaries, the combat bonuses for members of HVO, for care of war victims (aid for families of deceased soldiers and handicapped war veterans) and for material expenses of the Herceg Bosna institutions. This final point, the term of the donations by the Croatian taxpayers for the use of the front-state institutions, were taken a little too literally by the political leaders there, who instead used that money to get rich on the backs of the Croatian taxpayers.

All this puts Ćesić into a very awkward situation, as he first approved the millions for Herceg Bosna as assistant Defense Minister in Zagreb, and then distributed that money in the Ministry in Grude, before using his position as president of the management board of Hercegovačka Bank to decide which private companies, owned by his friend and relatives, to give the money to. The case of the plundering of Hercegovačka Bank will certainly be the first great test of the attitude of the new HDZ government towards Bosnia and Herzegovina and Šušak’s legacy of the 1990s.