Slovenia

Slovenian publishing and tourism group DZS said Ljubljana District Court has ordered the preventive restructuring of its financial liabilities, See News reported. The process will have no impact on the regular activities of the company and will allow DZS and its creditors to employ appropriate debt restructuring measures, the group said in a filing to the Ljubljana Stock Exchange on Thursday.

The European Union’s highest court ruled that Slovenia broke no laws when it imposed so-called “burden-sharing” in the 2013 banking rescue that wiped out about 600 million euros ($664 million) of bondholder debt, Bloomberg News reported today. The ruling may lend support to the euro member’s central bank, led by Governor Bostjan Jazbec, after it was raided by Slovenian police earlier this month on suspicion of wrongdoing during the bank rescue.

Automotive industry supplier Cimos, one of the biggest companies in Slovenia, will undergo court-supervised debt restructuring after the major creditors decided against a debt-to-equity conversion by the Thursday deadline, the Slovenian news agency STA reported.

The receiver of the Slovenian subsidiary of Austria's troubled construction company Alpine Bau has admitted EUR 2.2m in claims and rejected EUR 28m, including EUR 13.5m worth of claims by Slovenian motorway company DARS stemming from the yet unfinished construction of a tunnel between the coastal towns of Koper and Izola, the Slovenian Press Agency (STA) reported. Read more. (Subscription required.)

Primož Kozmus is a Slovenian national hero lionised for tossing a hammer to double Olympic gold. Soon he might be forced to honour his Alpine homeland another way: sacrificing his personal fortune to help avert a eurozone bailout, the Financial Times reported. Slovenia’s banks are in such a dire state that Mr Kozmus is almost certain to face a so-called haircut, which will slice through the more than €100,000 of junior bank bonds he bought during Slovenia’s heady credit boom. “The money was safe and then they changed the rules,” said Mr Kozmus.

Slovenia's banks are weak and trust in the system is limited, Finance Minister Uros Cufer told parliament on Friday, as expectations grew that the country may need financial help from abroad, Reuters reported. Slovenia's banks are crippled by at least 7.5 billion euros ($10 billion) of bad loans - more than a fifth of national output - with stress tests set to reveal in November how much help the sector will need.

Slovenia's largest retailer Mercator has appointed advisers to help with a 1 billion euro debt restructuring, according to finance industry and banking sources close to the negotiations, Reuters reported. The restructuring is a condition of a proposed sale of a 53.12 percent stake in Mercator to Croatian food and retail group Agrokor. In June, Agrokor said it would pay pay 120 euros per share for the food retail group, valuing the company - Slovenia's largest employer - at about 452 million euros.

Slovenia, a small euro-zone state that has recently caused major headaches for the European Union, has settled on a series of measures aimed at boosting tax revenue and stabilizing its public finances, The Wall Street Journal Emerging Europe blog reported. Its government said Thursday it would generate 200 million euros ($266 million) a year from fresh taxes by fighting the grey economy. The cabinet approved a plan to clamp down on tax evasion, curb undeclared employment, limit large, undeclared cash payments and other similar steps.

Slovenia’s recently formed Bad Asset Management Company, or DUTB, will receive its first batch of non-performing loans from the country’s state-owned lenders by end-June, clearing the way for the privatizations slated to help this small euro-zone member avoid an international bailout, The Wall Street Journal Emerging Europe blog reported. “The first transfer will total about 2 billion euros ($2.67 billion),” Simona Rodez, a DUTB spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal.

Bad loans in Slovenia's largest banks amount to almost a fifth of all their loans, the country's central bank said on Tuesday, adding that a planned capital hike of 900 million euros should suffice to keep them afloat, Reuters reported. The central bank's Vice Governor Stanka Zadravec Caprirolo said that the planned amount should be "absolutely sufficient" even beyond 2013. The central bank said that bad loans in the country's largest banks, in which the state has a stake, amount to 18.3 percent of all loans.