Page 66 - RusRPTJul21

The NWF held a total of $189.41bn as of June 1, or RUB13,938 trillion of which 12% is monetary gold and a total of $119bn (RUB8.66 trillion) are liquid assets – about 20% of Russia’s total GIR.
The difference is money in the fund that is committed to guarantee various programmes, such as VEB.RF (formerly Vnesheconombank) large scale infrastructure projects. Under current rules the Duma can only tap the liquid assets in the fund above 7% of GDP.
The wealth fund currently holds 35% of its liquid assets in dollars, worth about $41.5bn, with the same amount in euros and the rest spread across yuan, gold, yen and pounds, Bloomberg reports.
Those dollars will be sold off over next month, according to Siluanov.
The change in the make of the fund will take place within the central bank’s huge reserves which topped $600bn this month for the first time ever, making its market impact -- if there is one -- hard to trace.
The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) has also been running down its exposure to the dollar in its wider gross international reserves (GIR) and sold off over $100bn worth of US T-bills last year. At the same time Russia has been pushing its trade partners to settle trade deals in national currencies rather than dollars, which is the usual currency of choice to settle payments in international trade.
After the change, the fund’s assets will be held 40% in euros, 30% in yuan, 20% in gold and 5% each in yen and pounds, Siluanov said as cited by Bloomberg.
The central bank reports the currency distribution of its reserves with a six-month lag, refusing to provide information on its current holdings.
When it was set up the NWF held only dollars, euros and pounds sterling, but more recently yuan, Chinese government bonds and gold have been added to the mix last April. Then in February this year the Japanese yen was also added to the basket. At the time of the last report of the make up of the fund yen was 5% and the yuan was 15%. The share of dollar and euro assets in the NWF was reduced from 45 to 35% to make room for the new currencies, but the level of investments in the pound sterling was left unchanged.
In 2018, President Vladimir Putin supported a plan to de-dollarize the Russian economy, developed by the government in response to tougher US sanctions (in particular, the blocking of assets of Oleg Deripaska's Rusal and Viktor Vekselberg's Renova).
In 2014–2019, the share of the dollar in trade and financial flows of Russia fell by an average of 15–20 percentage points, ING bank wrote as cited by RBC, including up to 49% in the export of goods and services, 25% in imports, 37% in external debt, etc.
66 RUSSIA Country Report July 2021 www.intellinews.com