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loan portfolios of Platinum Bank, New Bank, and Forum Bank.
Assets of about 30 bankrupt banks – with a face value of $360mn – are to be auctioned off by the State Guarantee Fund. Last week, the Fund earned $4mn from the sale of bank assets – about two thirds for loan papers and one third for physical assets owned by the banks.
The privatization bug has spread to state-owned PrivatBank, which has set a goal of selling more than 900 real estate properties by the end of this year . So far, through the SETAM and PB.LOT.UA electronic sales platforms, the bank has sold apartments, offices, houses, land plots and parking spaces in residential complexes, the bank reports. To drum up buyer interest, the bank beckons: “Today, at open auctions, PrivatBank offers real estate in new buildings in Kyiv, Dnipro, Mikolaiv, Yuzhnoukrainsk and Chernivtsi. In addition, office and production facilities, hotels, recreation centres and land plots are for sale.”
Ukraine's Individuals Deposit Guarantee Fund (IDGF) is going to file a lawsuit against Russia to the international arbitration tribunal seeking to collect compensation for the loss of investment on the territory of annexed Crimea by Delta Bank , which went bankrupt in 2015 . The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has declared Delta Bank, the country’s fourth largest bank by assets at the time, insolvent as its owner had been unable to take effective, efficient and timely measures to improve the financial state of the bank. Simultaneously, three other lenders controlled by Delta's owner, Kyiv-based millionaire Mykola Lagun - Kreditprombank, Omega Bank and Astra Bank - were also declared insolvent by the regulator.
8.2 Central Bank policy rate
The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has kept its key policy rate on hold at 18% following its increase by 0.5 percentage points (pp) from September 7 , the regulator said following the policy meeting in a statement on October 25.
"The current and forecast monetary conditions are sufficiently tight to bring inflation to its medium-term target of 5% in 2020," the central bank' statement reads.
In September, consumer price inflation reached 8.9% year-on-year, having exceeded both the upper limit of the target range (6.5% ± 2 pp set for the end of the third quarter of 2018) and the July projections of the regulator (8.3%).
The moderate drop in inflation compared with previous months was due to slower growth in food prices, driven by an increase in domestic and imported supply of food products, as well as lower global food prices. At the same time, the underlying inflationary pressure remains strong. This is reflected in the sustained high reading of core inflation (8.7% y/y in September), the NBU added.
Specifically, domestic demand remains high and further growth in production costs, including labour costs, put an upward pressure on prices. The hryvnia weakening against the US dollar in July-August influenced prices of some goods, especially imported ones. At the same time, the rapid growth in global crude oil prices seen in the past months passed through to fuel prices and
52 UKRAINE Country Report November 2018 www.intellinews.com