A meeting between Croatian Foreign Minister Vesna Pusic and her Slovenian counterpart Karl Erjavec on efforts to solve the dispute over the now-defunct Ljublajnska Banka and to have the ratification of Croatia's Treaty of Accession with the European Union in the Slovenian parliament on time, began in Brussels after 1900 hrs Wednesday.
The meeting, which is taking place in the building housing the Council of the European Union, is likely to last an hour and a half.
Pusic and Erjavec will hold talks tete-a-tete first, and later their associates will join them in their meeting.
Upon her arrival at the meeting, the Croatian minister declined to give any statement.
Erjavec said he expected a step forward to be made on this occasion.
A few days ago, Pusic said that the two neighbours were close to reaching a solution.
Before leaving Ljubljana for Brussels, Erjavec also said that he was optimistic about the Ljubljanska Banka issue. He also announced that he would inform his Croatian counterpart that not much time had been left for the ratification given the political situation in Slovenia after some junior partners started leaving the ruling coalition.
Slovenia's officials have stated that ratifying the Croatia-EU treaty is conditional on Croatia's readiness to withdraw power of attorney for the lawsuits against Ljubljanska Banka before Croatian courts.
Croatia's representatives have said, in the meantime, that Zagreb is willing to withdraw tits power of attorney in the event that alternative models are found for the solution of the savings which Croatians had kept in Ljubljanska bank's subsidiaries and later transferred to Croatian banks in the early 1990s.
The European Union has been mounting pressure on the two countries to expedite efforts to find a mutually acceptable solution for the bank issue and to have the ratification completed in Slovenia's parliament in time for Croatia to join the EU bloc on 1 July, as planned.
