Page 46 - UKRRptAug18

‘responsAbility Participations AG’ has had its purchase of 51% 0f the shares in Bank Lviv approved by the National Bank of Ukraine. According to its website 60% of responsAbility Participations belong to Swiss financial institutions, including Baumann&Cie, Raiffeisen Switzerland, Swiss Re Foundation, Vontobel Beteiligungen, 21% – to private investors and 19% – to managers and employees. The core business of responsAbility Participations is investment in developing markets.
The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) sees no reasons to greenlight the second request made by the small Minsk-headquartered state-owned lender Paritetbank to purchase the Ukrainian operations of Russia's Sberbank, after the recent rejection of its first bid by the regulator. The NBU's deputy governor Kateryna Rozhkova said in an interview with Reuters on July 24 that the outcome was yet to be determined, but she did not see how it could be different this time around. "We have refused this bank before," she added. "I cannot imagine what new argument they can provide." Staff at the central bank are still reviewing the application, however, she said, and have three months from its submission to decide. Meanwhile, according to bne IntelliNews' correspondent in Minsk, Paritetbank has changed its owners between the two bids, and is now owned by the nation's State Property Fund instead of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s administrative affairs department.
The merger of Alfa-Bank Ukraine and Ukrsotsbank (Kyiv) will be completed in H1 2019 , Alfa Group CEO in Ukraine and Board Chairman of Ukrsotsbank Ivan Svitek said in an interview. "The legal merger is scheduled for the first half of the next year, but before the merger of the two giants as Alfa and Ukrsotsbank, and there have not yet been such mergers in the Ukrainian market, we need to do a lot of preparatory work. We are now trying to transfer all active clients of Ukrsotsbank to the Alfa platform. Our goal, to, which we are systematically moving, is the transfer of 75% of all active clients, including in business volumes, to Alfa Bank's balance sheet by the end of 2018," Svitek said in a joint interview with Board Chairperson of Alfa Bank Ukraine Victoria Mykhailo with Interfax-Ukraine.
8.2 Central Bank policy rate
The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) increases its key policy rate by 0.5 percentage points (pp) to 17.5% from July 13 with the aim to bring "inflation back to the target range in 2019", the regulator said in a statement on July 12.
"The NBU believes that a number of factors can pose a threat to inflation decreasing to the target level - namely, a continued pickup in domestic demand, active labor migration, higher risks to receiving the next tranche from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other related financing, excessively high inflation expectations, and lower investor interest to assets of developing countries," the statement reads.
The move followed the central bank's May decision to keep its key policy rate unchanged at 17% due to the fact that the current monetary conditions are sufficiently tight to bring inflation to its medium-term target.
According to the central bank, a tighter monetary policy will neutralize their effect, driving inflation down to 5.8% as of the end of 2019 and 5% in 2020.
46 UKRAINE Country Report August 2018 www.intellinews.com