Page 54 - UKRRptDec19

clearly inspired by the growing pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which has explicitly cited concerns with the possible denationalisation of Privatbank and its return to its former owned oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky as one of the obstacles to signing off on a Extended Fund Facility (EFF) worth circa $5bn. The​ ​IMF team left Kyiv last week without signing off on a deal​ for the second time this year due to these lingering concerns.
The number of contactless and tokenized payment cards has increased by 70% since January​. With 6.7mn contactless and 1.9mn tokenized cards now in use in Ukraine, they account for 22% of active payment cards, reports the National Bank of Ukraine. According to Mastercard, Ukraine is now among the top 10 European countries for using these technologies.
8.1.4 ​Bank news
PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest bank, recorded the hryvnia equivalent of $1.7bn in profit in the first 10 months of this year​, double the level during the same period last year. After the bank was nationalized, the state had to inject $5.5bn into the bank to stabilize it. According to new central bank numbers, Ukraine’s solvent banks recorded $2.2bn in profit through October, three times the level of the same period last year.
Assets of Kyiv-based International Investment Bank (IIB), in which Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko owns a 60% stake, shrank by 53.8% ​year-on-year to UAH3.065bn, according to the lender's financial report. IIB is Ukraine's 24th largest bank by assets among 76 operating banks in the country as of early July. Ihor Kononenko, Poroshenko's business partner and former deputy head of the president's faction in the Verkhovna Rada parliament, owns a 14.9% stake in the bank. The bank's assets declined by almost 67.8% y/y and liabilities by 70.6% y/y in the third quarter. At the same time, the bank's net profit amounted to UAH17.78mn, which is 17.9% y/y.
The Cabinet of Ministers has appointed three new independent members of the Supervisory Board of Oschadbank​: Janne Harjunpaa (Finland); Juan Enrique Perez Calot (Spain), and Igor Mityukov (Ukraine). A Kyiv court has postponed to Dec. 5 a review of a lawsuit by Sevki Acuner, former head of EBRD in Ukraine against the National Bank of Ukraine for refusing to approve him for the post of chairman of the Oschadbank Supervisory Board.
An appeal court has upheld ​May's ruling of Kyiv's district administrative court​, which cancelled the decision of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) to exclude local operations of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) ​from the register of audit firms that are eligible for bank audits earlier this year. The Ukrainian operations of PwC were challenging the NBU's decision ​to withdraw the bank auditing rights​ of the company in a Kyiv court after the international firm failed to identify alleged improprieties that led to a multi-billion capital shortfall at PrivatBank.
8.2 ​Central Bank policy rate
The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) cut its key policy rate by lopping off a whole percentage point and bring the rate to 15.5% per annum​ from 16.5%, the regulator said in a statement on October 24.
54​ UKRAINE Country Report​ December 201 ​ ​www.intellinews.com