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representative office of the China Development Bank to open in Minsk , the regulator said in a statement on June 7. "The representative office in Minsk is being established for the purpose of studying the possibilities of developing trade and economic relations between the two countries," the statement reads. "At present, four representative offices of foreign banks... are registered in Belarus." Currently, Belarus-China cooperation is mainly limited to project finance, when Chinese state credit resources are channelled to major state infrastructure and industrial projects in Belarus. In 2015, China Development Bank opened a $3bn subsidised credit line to Belarus (with annual rate of 2%) and a $4bn credit line on a commercial basis. Five years before, the same bank opened a $8.3bn credit line to Belarusian state-controlled companies. In 2009, Belarus secured a $5.7bn credit line with Export-Import Bank of China.
The Minsk-headquartered small bank Paritetbank which was controlled by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s administrative affairs department, is trying to buy the Ukrainian operations of Russia's Sberbank for a second time , after a recent rejection by the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) on its first bid. In March, the NBU attributed its rejection of the first bid by Paritetbank to "the incompatibility of the applicant with the requirements of the legislation of Ukraine," the NBU said in a statement on March 27, without elaborating. In late 2017, Paritetbank said that it is "highly assesses the potential of [Ukraine's] Sberbank in the context of the goals and tasks facing the management for the development of the banking business". However, some Minsk-based market experts attribute the controversial move to the possibility that Lukashenko is acting in the interests of German Gref, Russia's Sberbank head. Russian billionaire Mikhail Gutseriev, the authoritarian president's confidant and one of the richest businessmen in Russia, could be a mediator in the deal, they say.
24 BELARUS Country Report July 2018 www.intellinews.com