Consumer loans taken by citizens from banks must not be sold to debt collection agencies but only to other banks, SDP leader Peđa Grbin and the whip of the parliament's Green-Left Bloc (ZLB), Sandra Bencic, said on Sunday, noting that they would submit a motion to that effect to the parliament.

Speaking at a news conference on debt bondage and the operation of collection agencies outside the Croatian National Bank (HNB), Grbin and Bencic said that they would put forward a bill which they believe should help solve the problem of debt trading and protect consumers.

Debt trading is a business worth €5 billion, and the public could hear more about it at the end of last year, when personal data of a large number of clients leaked from the B2 Kapital collection agency, they said.

“Under our proposal, consumer loans cannot be sold to collection agencies. Other banks are the only ones claims can be sold to because under the Credit Institutions Act, only banks have a framework for consumer protection that is in line with the relevant laws and directives,” Bencic said.

Consumer loans also include housing loans and loans amounting to less than HRK 1 million. Those loans are the most frequent ones in the market and are used to cover the most basic needs of citizens, she said.

Bencic also proposes that those loans should not be sold to other banks either if the debtor does not consent to it.

The HNB does not supervise collection agencies, they are less regulated than bakeries or hair salons, she said.

“They are used for money laundering by turning a certain amount of money into a claim, a debt, which is then resold several times in a chain that starts with a bank and ends with big players, for example, in the energy market,” she said.

The state must control how loans, which citizens take to resolve their housing issue or meet their financial obligations, are managed, said Grbin.

“This is not a call on people not to pay their bills. People sometimes cannot repay their loans due to objective reasons, as we saw 15 years ago with loans pegged to the Swiss franc,” he said, adding that he feared the same thing would happen in the current time of high inflation.

With their proposal the SDP and ZLB ask for the same thing that former finance minister Zdravko Maric promised to do, said Boris Lalovac, a former SDP finance minister.

He called on the Finance Ministry to go through commercial banks’ business records to see if there had been cases of abuse.

SDP and We Can! to call on ruling majority parl. groups to support Hrvoj Sipek’s dismissal

Grbin and Bencic also said that their party groups would call on party groups from the parliamentary majority to support with their signatures a proposal for the government to launch the procedure to dismiss State Attorney-General Zlata Hrvoj Sipek, noting that their party groups would not support her report on her office’s work in 2021 next week.

Grbin reiterated that Hrvoj Sipek had lied to the parliament twice when asked if she had communicated with former state secretary Josipa Rimac, a suspect in the wind farm case.

Hrvoj Sipek on Saturday dismissed the opposition’s allegations, stressing that her communication with Rimac did not concern wind farms and that her statement in the parliament was completely misinterpreted.

“Anyone has the right to demand it, but I have no intention of resigning because I really did not do anything contrary to my duties as the First Deputy to the State Attorney-General or the State Attorney-General, and I did not abuse my office in any way,” Hrvoj Sipek told Nova TV.