Around a quarter of a million Croatians own bank accounts that have been frozen due to debts, and their overall debt totalled 16.6 billion kuna (€2.2 billion) in June 2019, Croatia's state-run Financial Agency (Fina) said on Thursday.

Broken down by gender, around two thirds of the frozen accounts were owned by men (64 percent), whereas women accounted for the remaining third (34 percent). In terms of amounts owed, men account for nearly three quarters of the overall debt, owing some 12.1 billion kuna (€1.6 billion) vs 4.5 billion kuna (€608 million) owed by women.

By city and county, the largest portion of indebted Croatians was in the City of Zagreb, where little over 53,000 residents had a 4.8 billion kuna total debt (€648 million).

Four other counties had indebted residents owing a billion kuna or more, all of which are around major urban centres – Zagreb County (which surrounds the city of Zagreb but does not include it) with 1.6 billion kuna (€216 million), followed by Split-Dalmatia with 1.4 billion kuna (€189 million), and Osijek-Baranja and Primorje-Gorski Kotar with little over 1 billion kuna (€135 million) each.

Those five counties alone – which all include or gravitate towards Croatia’s four major cities of Zagreb, Split, Rijeka, and Osijek, account for some 130,000 frozen bank accounts and 10 billion kuna (€1.35 million) of debt, according to Fina’s report.

Massive numbers of people with their accounts frozen i.e. seized by creditors – mainly due to overdue mortgage payments, utility bills and telecom bills – has been a major issue in Croatia for years.

The government’s last attempt to alleviate the problem was a package of bills passed in July last year, which included write-offs for debts up to 10,000 kuna (€1,350) owed to state or local government authorities or utility companies owned by them.

At the time, some 325,000 Croatians had their accounts frozen over debts.

(€1 = 7.37 kuna)

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