PRIVILEGED AGRARIAN BANK IN THE ROLE OF LIQUIDATION BANK

Original scientific paper
Autor: Prof. Dragana Gnjatović PhD

Summary: In the autumn 1936, government of Dr. Milan Stojadinovic passed a decree suspending the “peasants’” moratorium and the scheduled writing-off of the half of farming population’s debts. In the course of implementation of this decree, in many individual cases of creditor-debtor relationships, it appeared that its legal framework was insufficiently transparent, that it was too generalised and incomplete for an implicit explanation of any given concrete state of facts. Up to the beginning of the Second World War, the said decree underwent three additional amendments, with five rules of procedure having been prescribed on its implementation, and another 44 authentic interpretations adopted for its individual and particular articles. Privileged Agrarian Bank was given the task to carry out its implementation: it was to take over the remaining agrarian debt portfolio from the private shareholding banks and agrarian crediting cooperatives and, in the name and on behalf of the government, to indemnify all of these crediting institutions for one part of the written-off debt, this job to be completed within the time period of 14 year. Thus an institution specialised in agrarian crediting, initially conceived to become the main financier of agrarian development in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, was turned into a mere state-administered liquidation bank. It was unable to overcome, within the prescribed time-frame, not only problems related to the legal deficiencies in the Decree on liquidation of farming debts, but also the problems pertaining to the large scale and volume of work entrusted to it. In view of an enormous concentration of creditor-debtor cases arriving in this financial institution to be resolved, the work on final taking over and settlement of farming debts was being constantly prolonged. Ultimately, this work was to be violently terminated on 6 April 1941, when during the bombardment of the city of Belgrade, all the documentation kept at the main headquarters of this bank in Belgrade, perished under bombs and fire that struck and destroyed this bank.

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