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The Regions This Week
March 1, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 7
Eastern Europe
Moody's mentioned “unorganised regime change” as one of the risks for the Russian economy for the first time in a ratings note.
The Ukrainian Constitutional Court can-
celled criminal responsibility for illicit enrich- ment, Ukrainska Pravda online outlet reported quoting four separate unnamed sources. The court believes that criminal responsibility for such wrongdoing violates the presumption of in- nocence. The parliament passed the law in 2015 as one of the conditions for Ukraine to receive a visa-free regime with the European Union and to continue its cooperation with the IMF.
Belarus is in hot water again for cheating on trade, but this time its not shrimps or apples being sent to Moscow, but coal mined in the breakaway regions of Donbas in Ukraine that is being sold to Ukrainian power plants. Belarusian exports of anthracite coal to Ukraine jumped 340- fold y/y in 2018.
Ukraine's industrial output declined 3.3% year- on-year in January, after a 3.5% y/y drop in December, due to a continuing decline in manu- facturing and a production drop in mining, the nation's state statistics agency Ukrstat reported.
Russia’s retail banking giant Sberbank earned yet another record profit in 2018, but probably doesn't have the cash to cover a full 50% of profit dividend payout. Sberbank earned RUB831.7bn ($12.6bn) under IFRS, up 11% from the year be- fore, the bank announced, but will pay less than the 50% dividend investors were hoping for.
The Russian Ministry of Finance held its most successful OFZ treasury bond auctions since 2015, placing securities worth RUB57.6bn. At the first auction the ministry placed six-year OFZs
in the amount of RUB35.1bn, while the demand for securities reached RUB46.7bn. The weighted average yield was 8.23% per annum.
Russian utility RusHydro tried to soothe inves- tors’ worries over dividend payments at a capital market day. Ahead of the massive write-offs in 2019 after the Russian Far East projects are com- missioned, RusHydro’s management rolled out its new dividend proposal, which envisages setting a floor for the absolute dividend level at par with the three-year average.
Russia’s Ministry of Agriculture set informal limitations on grain exports via quotas, Vedo- mosti reported. Russia’s grain harvest in the July 2017 to June 2018 marketing year was down 17% y/y from the record high base to 113mn tonnes that Russia brought in last year.
Sino-Belarus carmaker joint venture BelGee intends to double car sales on the Belarusian market, BelGee acting director general Gennady Svidersky said.
Russian oil companies are mulling a pipeline
to connect the Vankor oil fields to the newly opened Artic Northern shipping route. The com- panies have asked Deputy Prime Minister Maxim Akimov to consider the pipeline infrastructure construction project in order to load the Northern Sea Artic shipping route that goes around the top of Russia from Europe to Asia.
Ukraine's largest poultry producer MHP final- ised its acquisition of a 90%-plus stake in Perut- nina Ptuj, a poultry meat producer and processor in Southeast Europe headquartered in Slovenia. MHP said in a statement that "final consideration amount is subject to completion of the audited results of Perutnina Ptuj due diligence" for 2018.
Rapid development of consumer lending re- duced the non-performing loans portfolio of Ukrainian banks in October-December 2018 by 1.7 percentage points (pp) to 52.8%, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) said in its February bank- ing sector review.