“You Must Not Put the Seal of Fraud on My Forehead, I Have Never Been Dishonest, I Remain Honest!”
Anton Pesek and his financial affairs in the late 1920s
Keywords:
Anton Pesek, financial institutions, financial fraud, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and SlovenesAbstract
The article focuses on the entrepreneur Anton Pesek, who in the 1920s shook the circles of Ljubljana through a series of financial scandals. In 1919, he formed the Yugoslav Credit Institution, and in the mid-1920s, the Ljubljana Loan and Savings Bank and the Yugoslav Insurance Savings Bank, because of the many projects for which he needed money. In all cases, Pesek used the institutions to make generous loans to himself, placing himself, family members and dependants in top positions. He used practices such as false claims of financial stability, promises of extremely high interest rates and tempting offers of employment in exchange for a deposit. All Pesek's financial institutions ended up in liquidation or bankruptcy, and at his trial in 1927 he was acquitted of fraud charges thanks to a strong legal defense and sentenced to only ten months in prison.
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