The Kompas and Lovec hotels, which have 95 and 52 rooms, respectively, were sold by Kompas Hoteli Bled, a firm controlled by Ivan Tatić and Milorad Sikima.

The two hotel owners also own two hotels in the centre of Ljubljana - Best Western Premier Hotel Slon and City Hotel.

Siol reported on Friday that Tatić and Sikima had decided to sell the Bled hotels in 2017 to finance the purchase of another hotel in Ljubljana.

The Bled hotels were bought by Golden Forest, a company whose ownership is unclear, according to Siol.

The portal said it was impossible to find out from public records who is behind Hongkong Gold Elephant International, a company set up four years ago, which owns Golden Forest.

But it has transpired several times before that Slovenians were behind what was considered a Chinese investment.

While Xiaolei Xu and Guo Jinlin from China are Golden Forest's legal representatives, Vladan Mitrović has been in charge of its business in Slovenia for a month now.

Mitrović used to run Best Western Hotel in Slovenia's Kranjska Gora, according to Siol.

Golden Forest is also interested in agriculture in Slovenia, having recently bought Mortista, a company registered for agricultural production.

The contract for the hotels that Siol has obtained shows the Chinese investors had paid for the majority of the sum with a EUR 7-million loan taken out with Sberbank.

Kompas Hoteli Bled, a group with 57 employees, closed 2017 with a net profit of some EUR 200,000 on revenue of EUR 5.4 million, the latest data available show.

Several years ago, the group was investigated for fictitious deals among owners, according to Siol.

In 2015, the police filed a criminal complaint against five individuals and one legal entity for defrauding Hotel Slon of EUR 3.5 million.

Over recent years, another two major hotels in Bled, Hotel Krim and Hotel Jelovica, have changed owners, but Sava remains the largest hotel owner in the picturesque resort at Lake Bled.