Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik Tuesday rejected allegations of taking a fake 750,000-euro ($835,000) loan from a local bank whose owner was arrested over money laundering in the transaction.
A probe was opened following a complaint filed in late 2015 by an opposition leader who alleged that Dodik, president of Bosnia's Serb-run Republika Sprska half, was granted the loan to cover up the purchase of a villa in Belgrade that he paid for in cash.
Dodik however told reporters Tuesday he was being targeted by "unprofessional, arrogant and political" entities in the judiciary.
Earlier this month police arrested Slobodan Pavlovic, the head of the Pavlovic bank which granted the loan, as well as three other people, including a former bank director, over the affair.
A prosecutor, quoted by local media, said Dodik was actually granted the loan in 2008, a year after the villa was bought, and that the one allegedly granted in 2007 was "fictious" with the documents regarding it were destroyed.
Dodik, who was not officially named as a suspect in the probe, assured he was granted the loan in 2007 and showed journalists a document claiming it was the loan agreement signed that year.
"I feel very safe, I'm clean," he said.
Dodik, the most powerful politician in Bosnia's Serb entity for the past decade, had regularly criticised the work of the joint judicial bodies in charge of the case.
He was threatening to organise a referendum on whether to give any recognition to the central judiciary, especially in rulings on war crimes and corruption cases.
Many Bosnian Serbs consider it to be biased against the Serbs.
Dodik has been targeted in the past by a multi-million-euro graft probe which was eventually halted in 2011 due to lack of evidence.
Since its 1990s inter-ethnic war, Bosnia has been split into two entities -- the Serbs' Republika Srpska and Muslim-Croat Federation. Each entity has its own government and they are linked by weak central institutions.
