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Weekly Lists
December 21, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 29
bne:Banker
Romania mulls introducing supplementary tax on bank assets
Turkish lender Aktifbank signs $1bn financing deal with Afreximbank
Romania’s government plans to levy a supplementary tax on banks’ assets, to be calculated on a quarterly basis depending on the aver- age level of the interest rates on the interbank market (ROBOR) for three-month and six-month maturities, Finance Minister Eugen Teodorovici confirmed on December 18. A bill has already been drafted in this regard, he confirmed.
The government estimates it will collect some RON3.6bn (€775mn, 0.38% of GDP) for the state budget from this supplementary tax
in 2019, based on the level of the interbank interest rates and the volume of bank assets.
Teodorovici explained that this is “a tax on greed”, which recalls the nationalist rhetoric against foreign companies of the ruling coali- tion’s leader Liviu Dragnea over the weekend.
Turkey's largest privately-owned investment bank Aktif Bank and African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) have signed a $1bn financing agreement, state-run news service Anadolu reported on December 17. The agreement was inked on the sidelines of Intra- Africa Trade Fair 2018 in Cairo.
Under the deal, Turkish exporters will be provided with $1bn in financing by 250 lenders from 50 countries.
Muzaffer Suat Utku, deputy head of the financial institutions section of Aktif Bank, said the bank visited 15 countries in Africa and met with 162 lenders to mediate with 200 firms for $600mn of foreign trade in a short period.
Russia’s banking sector recovery is well underway, with the sector turning in its best aggregate profit since March and earning more in the first 11 months of this year than it earned in the full year for the last three years.
Russian banks earned RUB212bn ($100mn) in November, which
is only slightly less than the RUB236bn they earned in March this year and more than any other month in the last four years, bar April 2017 (RUB214bn) and November 2015 (RUB264).
Cumulatively the RUB1.28 trillion banks earned in January- November is already more than the cumulative profit for the full years over the last four years and also 1.5-times more than the result for November last year, according to the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) data release on December 18.
Russia's banking sector profits reach four-year peak