By Marja Novak
LJUBLJANA, March 17 (Reuters) - Slovenia is committed to selling state-owned companies as it is the only way to create new jobs, its finance minister and central bank governor told a business conference on Tuesday, after years of stalling on privatisation.
Figures show that Slovenia's state-owned firms have significantly lower profits than privately owned companies and invest less, a problem compounded by public spending cuts over the past year as the government tries to bring down the deficit.
"The key question is whether a company can create new jobs. Many state companies cannot do that," Bank of Slovenia governor Bostjan Jazbec, who also sits on the European Central Bank's governing council, said.
Successive governments in Slovenia, which broke away from the former Yugoslavia in 1991, have refused to sell major banks and companies so the government still controls about 50 percent of the economy and as much as 60 percent of the banking sector.
But Finance Minister Dusan Mramor told delegates at the conference in Ljubljana that the centre-left government, in office since September, would press on with a privatisation drive started in 2013. Mramor said the government would draft a long-term privatisation strategy by the end of April.
Asked whether the government was committed to privatisation, he said, "Definitely."
Slovenia returned to economic growth last year after dipping in and out of recession for years, a downturn which has exposed corruption and cronyism across most of its industries.
Unemployment reached 13.5 percent in January, the statistics office reported on Tuesday, up from 13 percent in December.
Jazbec said the banking sector would have to consolidate due to tougher competition across the European Union.
The Slovenian government poured some 3.5 billion euros ($3.7 billion) into banks in 2013 and 2014, which helped the country narrowly avoid an international bailout.
Mramor said the government had promised the European Commission it would over time sell all the state-owned banks that had received state help apart from the largest bank, NLB.
In the next few weeks, Slovenia hopes to sell the second largest bank Nova KBM (NKBM), one of the lenders that received state help, and to merge state-owned Abanka Vipa and Banka Celje before selling the merged group within the next few years.
(Editing by Zoran Radosavljevic and Louise Ireland)