A first-instance ruling by the Zagreb Municipal Civil Court reveals how an enforcement case, which only required a stamp, waited over five months. Meanwhile, Glumina Bank collapsed, and the state now faces a bill of nearly 2.5 million euros.
The Republic of Croatia will have to pay 2,067,364.27 euros from its budget-plus default interest and nearly 440,000 euros in court costs-to entrepreneur Antonijo Mihaljević, solely because a judge failed to stamp a document on time 28 years ago. The first-instance ruling by the Zagreb Municipal Civil Court, delivered by Judge Ana Lovrinov, concludes a dispute that has been ongoing since 2006, rooted in a trivial oversight from 1998.
At that time, an enforcement case-urgent by law-sat unresolved for months due to an erroneous insistence on paying a court fee, while Glumina Bank, the debtor from which Mihaljević was to recover over four million German marks, went bankrupt in the meantime.
The case began in September 1998, when Antonijo Mihaljević-son of investor Srećko Mihaljević-obtained a final judgment against Glumina Bank, owned by Marko Marčinko, which was to pay him 4,090,698 German marks plus interest. The bank did not pay, so on November 23, 1998, a motion for enforcement was filed with the Zagreb Municipal Court-a document that, under the regulations of the time, could have been resolved in a day or two, simply by stamping the orderly motion.
However, the first recorded action in the case file dates only to February 15, 1999-a warning about an unpaid court fee. The case was put on hold for 30 days in March, a new payment order was issued in April, and when Mihaljević finally submitted proof of payment on May 3, the court issued the enforcement order the very next day. But on April 30, 1999, Glumina Bank's bankruptcy had been opened, so the order was returned to the court with a note that it could no longer be executed. Judge Lovrinov explicitly states in the ruling that the delay occurred "solely due to an erroneous interpretation of legal provisions"-the unpaid fee, she concluded, "was not a legal prerequisite that prevented the court from acting."
The State Attorney's Office argued for years that Mihaljević would not have collected his claim anyway, because the bank had been under continuous account blockage since July 1998 and under HNB control. However, financial expert analyses shattered this thesis: expert Vlatka Sakar found that from late November 1998 until the opening of bankruptcy, the value of external payments from the bank's accounts exceeded 102 million Croatian kuna at the time, while direct payments from the giro account reached approximately 67.5 million kuna. Before the remainder was transferred to bankruptcy, the account still held 5.65 million kuna-a total of 73.15 million kuna available-against Mihaljević's claim with interest of approximately 17 million kuna.
Expert Ljerka Živković further explained that, under the Enforcement Act, Mihaljević's order would have had priority and would have been settled from incoming funds, and the court accepted this interpretation in full. "The interpretation that the provisions of the Payment Transactions Act would override those of the Enforcement Act would place the HNB's temporary administrator in a position to have the authority to invalidate decisions of the judiciary," the ruling states.
The court substantiated that the delay in Mihaljević's case was an anomaly by reviewing the enforcement registry: on the same day his motion was received, 11 other enforcement motions against Glumina Bank were filed, of which six were resolved within days, and three more within a month. Only three cases-including Mihaljević's-waited at least five months.
After the Supreme Court in 2025 overturned an earlier ruling and requested clarification on whether Mihaljević would have "certainly collected the claim," a new expert analysis was conducted. Expert Zrinko Ručević, initially reserved, fully agreed with expert Živković's findings after studying them, and the court determined that the findings of all three experts were mutually consistent.
A particularly sharp part of the ruling concerns the State Attorney's Office's actions in July 2026, when it again requested the procurement of FINA documentation. The judge deemed their objections "so vague and general that it is impossible to determine which expert analysis they refer to," concluding that the new evidence proposals were "aimed solely at stalling this proceeding." Srećko Mihaljević, in his testimony, expressed suspicion that "someone else stopped" the case, but the court dismissed this part of his testimony as subjective and unsubstantiated-no conspiracy was found, only an erroneous interpretation of court fee regulations.
The ruling is not yet final, and the state may appeal. The bankruptcy of Glumina Bank, which lasted nearly a quarter of a century, was concluded in October 2023, and Mihaljević's claim remained entirely unsatisfied.
