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The Regions This Week
January 12, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 6
Eastern Europe
A company tied to Russianbnaire Oleg Deripaska sued president Donald Trump’s former cam- paign manager Paul Manafort, claiming Deripas- ka was defrauded of $18.9mn it gave to Manafort to invest in a Ukrainian cable television venture, Bloomberg reported on January 10. The suit was filed on January 10 in New York state court by the US based company Surf Horizon Ltd., owned by Deripaska.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's trust rat- ing hit an all-time high in 2017 with 57.7% of respondents saying they trust him, according
to the state owned pollster, the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (VTsIOM). The trust rat- ing is slightly different from the approval rating polls run by VTsIOM and independent pollster the Levada Center, where Putin’s approval continues to be in the 80s.
Ukraine’s natural gas giant Naftogaz won a case against Russia’s Gazprom on December 22 in the Stockholm international arbitration court, which retroactively cancelled a take-or-pay clause in the controversial 2009 contract that is worth billions of dollars. Naftogaz paid UAH106bn ($3.8bn) in taxes and dividends to the national budget in 2017 as of late December, reports Interfax.
Oil prices topped $70 a barrel for the first time in three years on January 11, pushed up by the Opec+ production cut deal that reduces global output by 1.8bn barrels per day.
Russia’s state-owned oil major Rosneft can- celled its participation request in the auction for the gas assets of uncut diamond major Alrosa, threatening to block the sale. State-run natural gas giant Gazprom and the country's largest inde- pendent gas producer Novatek are also interested in the deal.
Russia’s key federal budget “non-oil-and-gas” deficit declined to 7.9% of GDP in 2017, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told TASS. The
non-oil deficit is the federal budget deficit the government would have if all its oil and gas revenue magically disappeared. In the boom years, while the headline deficit was in surplus, the non-oil deficit was running at about -4%
of GDP.
Russia’s economic growth is expected to stabi- lise at around 1.8% in 2018-2020 as the country has adjusted to the new level of oil prices, the World Bank said in its January report.
Russia’s rainy day Reserve Fund has ceased
to exist as of January 1, the Ministry of Finance reported. Set up in 2008 in the boom years, the Reserve Fund was a store of money designed
to top up the budget in times of crisis. However, there is still $66bn in another fund, the National Welfare Fund.
Imports of goods to Ukraine from Russia are growing faster than goods imported from the EU, but Europe is now sending twice as much
in dollar terms than Russia, according to the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU). Imports of goods from Russia were up by almost two fifths (38.6%) in the first 11 months of last year to $6.3bn, according to the NBU.
GV Gold, a Russian miner backed by BlackRock, plans an initial public offering in Moscow later in 2018 after first doubling its output in a possible acquisition, Chief Executive Officer German Pikhoya said. International fund BlackRock is also a shareholder.
Russians have given up on saving and are borrowing more instead to fund their lifestyle, data from the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) shows. Russians borrowed from banks RUB12 trillion ($210bn) in January-November 2017, up RUB1.2 trillion or 10% year-on-year, while their deposits, although more than twice as much at RUB25 trillion, were up just by RUB800bn, which corresponded to just a 3% increase.