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Zagreb - Both the ruling and opposition parties in the Croatian parliament on Thursday endorsed a set of eight bills amending various regulations following the adoption of the euro as legal tender.
Among them were penalty provisions that were previously given in the national currency, the kuna.
The State Secretary at the Ministry of Finance, Zdravko Zrinušić, said that the new euro amounts would be rounded off to the lower ten in line with EU law.
Boris Lalovac (Social Democratic Party) warned that the government-sponsored amendments to the law implementing the EU regulation on indices used as reference values gave Euribor as the sole measure of value, while previously several reference values were used in the granting of loans, including the national reference interest rate (NRS) and Euribor. In that way, people could choose whether they wanted a loan tied to the NRS or Euribor, he added.
Lalovac said that it would be better if the NRS was left in place because it had increased by over 4% in the last two years. "That means that people with Euribor-indexed loans had seen their interest rates go up by this amount, while those with loans tied to the NRS did not have their instalments increased."
He warned that Euribor is linked to the monetary policy of the European Central Bank and goes up because the bank sharply increases interest rates. "I'm surprised that we didn't protect our citizens by giving them an alternative but only the option of using Euribor," Lalovac said.