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bne July 2020 Eastern Europe I 47
allowed the bank to channel 75%, or UAH24.457bn ($930mn), of those profits to the national budget as dividends
by June 20, according to the bank's statement in the information disclosure system of the National Securities and Stock Market Commission of Ukraine.
As bne IntelliNews has reported, Ukraine’s banking sector returned to health last year and the sector’s profits expanded 1.4-fold over the first four months of this year to UAH25.2bn ($941mn), according to the NBU.
But clearly the coronacrisis is going to hurt the banking sector this year and knock its profits back; however, experts says a banking crisis is very unlikely.
“The NBU is managing the crisis well and has made good policy decisions,
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plus the banks are much stronger and so better able to withstand the shock,” said Easky, who added that according to PrivatBank’s own projections, while income and profits will be down the bank will still count on an “acceptable level of income and profit” this year.
“One of our advantages is we provide so many services and payment systems that our fee and transactions income is very stable. We have a very diversified income,” said Easky.
PrivatBank is doing its bit for the economy and developing plans and services to help small and medium- sized enterprises (SMEs) – a core customer demographic – overcome the coronacrisis.
“We want to make sure they survive
and come out the other end,” says Easky. “We are mobilising resources and reaching out to clients. We are here to help and we have adjusted our pricing downwards. There was a spike
in overdue payments of more than 30 days, but that is already down.”
In general, 2020 is not going to be a good year, said Easky, who predicted that the sector will already start to recover by 2021.
In the longer term, the board see its job as preparing the bank for privatisation. The government is committed to selling off some of its big assets and PrivatBank is definitely on the list, but those plans have obviously been delayed for now by the coronacrisis.
Construction work on Belarus’ Ostrovets nuclear power station almost complete, but is it safe?
Ben Aris in Berlin
Construction work at Belarus’ Ostrovets nuclear power plant (NPP) is coming to an end, with it expected to come online in July. But the facility remains a bone of contention with its neighbours, who simply don't trust the Belarusians to run a nuclear facility without something going wrong. Is Ostrovets really safe?
Minsk is keen on the plant, which will radically alter the small republic’s
power profile. For much of the last two years Minsk has been dogged by the Kremlin, as it has revamped its energy tax regime and in effect has cut Minsk off from hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies. Moscow has not been above using this largesse as a political weapon to get its way and the power from Ostrovets (known as Astravets to the
Russians) will enable Minsk to remove one of Moscow’s most powerful levers.
At the same time Russia has been instrumental in getting the project off the ground. The technology is from the state-owned nuclear power company Rosatom, which, as bne IntelliNews has reported, has massively ramped up its nuclear technology exports in the last
few years. What makes Rosatom
so attractive to work with it that is also provides the financing for the c.$10bn price ticket for the plant. Currently Rosatom has some 40 international projects either completed or under construction, according to the company, making it the market leader in international nuclear power technology.
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