June the 20th, 2021 - Have you checked your jacket pockets and old wallets lately? If you've got any of these Croatian banknotes lying around, you've only got a certain amount of time to get them exchanged as the Croatian National Banks begin removing them from circulation.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, the Croatian National Bank has so far withdrawn seven series of 5, 10, 50, 100 and 200 kuna banknotes, six of which were issued back in 1993 and one two years later. To date, however, 9.5 million such invalid Croatian banknotes, out of a total of more than three hundred million printed, are still in circulation.
The highest number of invalid banknotes (11 percent) in denominations of five kuna each were issued back in 1993. This banknote is primarily green with the image of Petar Zrinski and Fran Frankopan. The nominal value of this most invalid banknote stands at around 17 million kuna, writes Vecernji list.
The CNB pointed out that 750 of these oldest paper Croatian banknotes have been returned to them over the last year, and they have been exchanged for the same value. In the last year alone, the CNB received a total of 17,706 invalid Croatian banknotes, including 3,923 200 kuna banknotes bearing the image of Stjepan Radic.
In the year dominated by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, many people seemed entirely unaware that you haven't been able to spend some of these notes for as long as ten years now. The value of the old 200 kuna note in the last year stood at as much as 784,600 kuna. The total value of all returned Croatian banknotes exchanged from May 2020 to the end of May this year was around 1.44 million kuna in total!
A year ago, about 2,800 ten kuna banknotes, 1,707 20 kuna banknotes, a little more than five thousand old 50 kuna banknotes and a little more than three thousand old one hundred kuna banknotes were ''dusted off'' and returned.
The Croatian National Bank will replace all invalid kuna banknotes free of charge and without a time limit to anyone who brings them in person to the CNB box office at 5 Franjo Racki in Zagreb, or sends them in by mail.
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