The recount is likely to provide sufficient signatures, after which Virant is expected to set a 35-day term in which the 40,000 signatures necessary to call the referendum must be collected.

The disappearance of over 400 referendum signatures, which got lost somewhere between the National Assembly and the Interior Ministry, has caused wide condemnation and calls for resignation of Interior Minister Vinko Gorenak and Virant.

The referendum request filed by the Trade Union of Chemical, Non-Metal and Rubber Industries of Slovenia (KNG) was one of two referendum initiatives filed by trade unions against the laws establishing the bad bank and the Slovenia Sovereign Holding.

The other referendum was filed by the Trade Union of Energy Workers, but the government had struck a deal with the union and the latter withdrew the initiative.

While the union is satisfied with the agreement, under which state stakes in key energy companies will be treated as "strategic investments", it said today that some of their signatures too appear to have gone missing.

"The parliament's notification on the number of sheets (containing signatures) it received back from the (Interior) Ministry does not match the order of sheets in the original. It appears some jumble happened here as well," the union's president, Branko Sevčnikar, commented today.

But he added the matter was now "irrelevant" as the initiative had been withdrawn.