Ksenia Galouchko and Olga Tanas Moscow
RUSSIAN lawmakers pushed through a bill to aid banks, a day after Russia announced its biggest bailout of a retail lender since the rouble’s collapse began.
The lower house of parliament yesterday passed a bill in all three readings allowing the Deposit Insurance Agency to acquire stakes in banks before they face bankruptcy proceedings to support financial stability, according to a copy of the legislation.
The central bank is seeking to ease pressure on the rouble, which has depreciated 40 percent against the dollar this year, spurring deposit outflows and a move into dollars and euros.
National Bank Trust, one of the country’s top 15 lenders by retail savings, would be moved under the Deposit Insurance Agency’s management while an investor was selected to oversee the central bank’s 30 billion rouble (R6bn) injection, Bank of Russia said on Monday.
“It’s 100 percent sure that more banks will be rescued because there is an acute shortage of liquidity,” Maxim Osadchy at BKF Bank said. “The interbank market has practically come to a halt because of a lack of trust and the central bank is afraid of giving more roubles to banks so they don’t buy more dollars with them.”
Following the central bank’s surprise rate increase of 6.5 percentage points to 17 percent last week, Russian banks’ willingness to lend to each other is declining with the Mosprime overnight rate hitting 27.3 percent on Thursday, the highest since Bloomberg started compiling the data in 2006.
Under another bill that passed the Duma last week, the Deposit Insurance Agency will get as much as 1 trillion roubles from the government that it can invest in subordinated loans and preferred shares of banks. That will bring the Russian budget to a deficit of 0.8 percent to 0.9 percent of economic output this year, compared with the 0.6 percent surplus estimated earlier. – Bloomberg