Page 9 - BNE_magazine_10_2020

bne October 2020 The Month That Was I 9
Finance
Eastern Europe
Russia’s Rosstat revised its 2Q20 GDP estimate up from an 8.5% contraction to 8%. Rosstat said the change was
due to new reporting from certain enterprises and the Bank of Russia. The financial sector was less affected by the coronacrisis and in fact grew 6.1% y/y in the quarter and typically submits reports later than other sectors.
Russia’s finance minister Anton Siluanov says the government increased its borrowing to finance anti-crisis measures as promised. Russia’s public debt will near 20% of GDP by the end of 2021, up from 12.2% of GDP at the end of 2019. The all time low was 6.5% set in 2008.
Belarus' Finance Ministry may
place RUB10bn ($133mn) worth of government bonds on the Russian financial market before the end of this year, Deputy Finance Minister Andrei Belkovets told Cbonds in an interview.
Central Europe
Czechia will receive €305mn from the EU to support self-employed people who have been affected by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the European Commission reported on September 9.
Hungary issued €500mn of Samurai bonds in four tranches, the first foreign sovereign issuer of the Japanese bonds, according to Finance Minister Mihaly Varga. A third of the bonds were Green Samurai bonds. Japanese investors subscribed 80% of the issue.
The European Investment Bank
(EIB) has granted Poland an anti- coronavirus loan of €650mn. The loan is to “strengthen Poland’s emergency response system and pandemic preparedness, with a focus on health and civil protection,” the EIB said.
Trading volumes on the Warsaw Stock Exchange's main equities market were up 6.9% y/y to PLN17.5bn (€3.94bn) in August. The bourse’s main WIG index stood at 51,629.45 points, down 9% y/y in August and down 16.69% YTD.
Southeast Europe
Bulgaria’s government on September 9 gave the go-ahead to use funds from the EU’s temporary wage support mechanism SURE to mitigate the negative social-economic repercussions of the coronacrisis. The government said in August that it would borrow up to BGN1bn (€511mn) from the SURE mechanism to protect 250,000 jobs.
The European Commission (EC) approved an investment worth €875.5mn from the Cohesion Fund
to building the first stage of the Sibiu- Pitesti motorway in Romania, the first motorway crossing the Carpathian Moun- tains. Romania will add to the EC’s contribu- tion with €485mn to finance the first stage of the project, estimated to cost €1.33bn.
The European Central Bank (ECB) has extended its euro liquidity lines for the Croatian National Bank (HNB) to the end of June 2021. The HNB can borrow up to €2bn from the ECB in exchange for Croatian kuna through a swap line agreement.
Moody's Investors Service downgraded Turkey by one notch to B2 with negative outlook, taking it to five notches below investment grade in an unscheduled rating action on September 11.
The EBRD is maintaining its focus on expanding access to finance for Turkish businesses, with a new $54mn loan to Isbank, the largest private lender
in Turkey. The funds are for Turkish businesses suffering from the coronacrisis. The EBRD has already invested more than €1bn in Turkey this year.
Eurasia
Kazakhstan’s central bank sold $681mn from the Central Asian nation’s rainy-day National Fund on the domestic market in August to help prop up the Kazakh currency, the tenge.
The EBRD will provide $20mn to Uzbekistan’s biggest commercial bank Bank Ipak Yuli to support SMEs and domestic companies active in international trade, according to the bank.
Investors have reacted negatively to Rio Tinto and Turquoise Hill’s plan to borrow up to $500mn to develop their giant Oyu Tolgoi copper mine in Mongolia. Turquoise Hills shares fell 23% in New York on the news, slashing the market value of the company to $1.75bn.
The Iranian rial (IRR) has again been trading at a series of fresh all-time lows against the dollar on the free market. The IRR versus the USD fell
to a nadir of 269,000 on September
13, but recovered to 262,700 by the end of trading on September 14. The rial has lost almost exactly half of its value against the dollar to date in 2020.
Uzbekistan’s state hydropower company Uzbekhydroenergo has taken a 25-year loan worth $60mn from the Asian Development Bank for construction of three new hydropower plants on the Aksu River. Uzbekistan’s energy strategy aims to generate
a quarter of its power from renewable sources by 2030, including 3.8 GW of hydro energy.
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