* Bank sold 23 mln euros at 97.25/eur -cbank
* Dinar closes at 97.32, just off intervention level
* Such interventions 'hard to understand', says analyst
* Bank governor says won't run down forex reserves
(Recasts, adds dinar close, analysts quotes)
By Gordana Filipovic
BELGRADE, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Serbia's dinar reversed early losses to close firmer on Wednesday, after the central bank intervened to steer the currency away from its new record low of 97.70/euro, prompting trading volume to rise sharply.
The dinar firmed to 97.32/euro, after central bank governor Radovan Jelasic announced the intervention in a television interview, dealers said.
The bank sold 23 million euros at a rate of 97.25/euro.
Serbia's dinar fall is purely led by domestic woes, rather than troubles in Greece [nLDE60C1IR], four of whose banks control almost 14 percent of Serbia's banking sector, analysts said.
"There are sufficient domestic reasons for its slide not related to worries about Greece," an analyst in Belgrade said.
A profit warning by France's Societe Generale on Wednesday [nLDE60C01P] prompted some concern however that foreign-owned banks in Serbia may face higher end-2009 loan loss provisioning. The French bank controls 4.5 percent of the Serbian banking sector by assets, according to the Serbian central bank.
The intervention prompted some speculative trading later in the day, bankers said, with banks trading a total of almost 60 million euros -- a far cry from the hundreds of millions of euros that used to trade in a day in 2007 or 2008. In the past year, trade has been running at around 10 million a day.
"This type of intervention is hard to understand," another analyst said. "They appear to be ready to intervene every time there's a threat to cross a big figure. And we seemed to be too close to 98. But they are not stopping the trend."
The dinar has been hit by a double-digit fall in remittances from abroad in December, strong corporate demand to repay maturing credits, and the exchange of half a billion euros for dinars by the government to balance the 2009 gap, the central bank said on Tuesday. [ID:nLDE60B0IN]
The dinar lost 7.6 percent of its value against the euro in 2009 and has shed another 1.3 percent this month. The central bank has also come under pressure from importers since early December, when demand for hard currencies traditionally soars.
PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE?
Some opposition parties want parliament to debate the dinar, which had lost 25 percent since October 2008, when investors fled emerging markets due to global financial turmoil.
The Serbian Chamber of Commerce will send its dinar-related demands to both the central bank and the government on Jan. 21, calling for an "institutionalised debate" on the dinar and some former officials say Serbia should ditch the dinar for the euro.
In his TV interview, Jelasic said the central bank would not
bow to public pressures to strengthen the dinar
"We will not intervene because we are all over local media pages, but because this morning's quotations are somewhat higher and that's why we have called a fixing session to see how much banks want to buy or sell," he said.
Speaking a day after the bank left its key policy rate at 9.5 percent, after eight rate cuts by a cumulative 825 basis points in 2009, Jelasic said the bank had no intention of spending too much of official reserves to defend the rate.
"How can you have a fiscal gap of 4.5 percent of GDP, the current account deficit of 2.5 billion euros, modest foreign investment and a stable exchange rate," Jelasic said.
"If you spend 100-110 billion dinars more than you have earned, of course it has an impact on the dinar," he said, referring to Serbia's 2009 fiscal gap. (Additional reporting by Sebastian Tong in London; Editing by John Stonestreet/Ron Askew)