(AFP) – 8 hours ago

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jaeZJD3b1GV990rs-urqTIYVgm3g

BELGRADE — Serbia vowed to co-operate with Austria in the investigation into scandal-plagued Austrian bank HGAA which is suspected of laundering money for a Serbian drug baron, Serbian media said on Sunday.

Serbia's Interior Minister Ivica Dacic met with Austria's chief of police Franz Lang on the sidelines of an international forum near Salzburg, the ministry said in a statement quoted by Serbia's Tanjug news agency.

Dacic told Lang that Serbian police would help in the inquest, vowing to "investigate to the end", the report said.

Dacic said there were "several million pages of documents that needed to be searched through".

The meeting follows a report this week in Austrian daily Osterreich which alleged that Serbian Darko Saric, dubbed "the Balkan cocaine king", laundered nearly 100 million euros (125 million dollars) between 2007 and 2009 in the troubled bank, which was nationalised in 2009 to avoid collapse.

According to the report, which quoted investigators, the nature of the laundering would have required participation of senior management at the bank.

Saric was indicted by Serbian prosecutors in April on drug trafficking charges and is on the run.

HGAA (Hypo Group Alpe Adria) is at the centre of a number of scandals.

Its former CEO Wolfgang Kulterer was arrested in mid-August, and it is being investigated by Austrian authorities for conspiracy, fraud, embezzlement, money laundering and false accounting.

Deceased Austrian far-right leader Joerg Haider was suspected of using his influence to distribute funds from HGAA accounts without necessary guarantees, and Haider was suspected of involvement in HGAA's 2007 takeover by German bank BayernLB.

HGAA's reckless expansion in the Balkans in the 1990s has been particularly costly, with a quarter of its total loans in the region -- around 8.3 billion euros -- in default.