Kommersant 24 Ottobre 2008

he authorities have found another way to stanch the outflow of capital from Russia, which has exceeded $50 billion in the last two months. Subsidiaries of foreign banks have been issuing loans to their parent institutions for the last few months.

Kommersant has learned that the head of a number of those banks were summoned to the Central Bank over the weekend for discussions of that practice and have been threatened with deprivation of Central Bank and Russian state bank credits, as well as harsher measures. According to a source, the bankers had private meetings and each of them was told to stop practices that encouraged the outflow of capital from Russia.

Crediting by nonresident banks in September increased sharply. Raiffeisen Bank issued an extra 38.6 billion rubles in credit, and Unicreditbank issued 36.9 billion rubles more. During the same month, they decreased the credits they issued to Russian banks by 2.8 billion and 16.7 billion rubles, respectively. Analysts interpret that to mean that those credits were going to the banks’ cash-hungry main offices. Fifteen of Russia’s 100 largest banks are either wholly owned or majority-owned by foreign banks.

A Central Bank sources that far from all of the bankers who may have deserved a lecture were called in for one. The source noted that VTB Europe is counting on liquidity support from the European Central Bank. The VTB Group is active in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, France, Great Britain and Cyprus. A number of those banks are known to have liquidity problems. VTB plans to allocate about $500 million for the development of its European subsidiaries by the end of this month.

Source >  Kommersant | oct 23