Page 5 - bne_newspaper_September_21_2018

The Regions This Week
September 21, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 5
Eastern Europe
The Ukrainian government failed to convince
the IMF to sign off on a new agreement that would allow the release of a badly needed $1.9bn tranche of the $17.5bn stand-by programme. Ukraine’s main international donor the IMF is insisting the Rada pass the budget before any new agreement can be signed.
Communist protesters took to the streets to demonstrate against a regional run off vote in Russia’s Vladivostock they claim was stolen by the Kremlin due to highly unusual voting patterns reported in the final stages of the vote counting that saw their candidate loose by a whisker at the last minute.
Russia and Turkey agreed to create a demilitarised buffer zone in Syria's Idlib region to separate Syrian government forces from rebel fighters holed up there. “Radically-minded” rebels would be required to withdraw from the zone
by the middle of next month, Russian President Vladimir Putin said following a meeting with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Industrial output growth in Russia in August slowed down to 2.7% y/y from July's 3.9% y/y growth. Despite the slowdown the numbers exceeded expectations with Reuters analyst consensus expecting 2.5% growth in August.
Retail in Russia is recovering on the back of rising incomes and non-food sales grew strongly in August, up 4.2% y/y from a growth of 3.3% a month earlier, Rosstat reported. However, the growth in food sales was less strong, up to 2.8% in August from 2.7% the month before.
Russia's largest gold miner Polyus Gold bought out its own Eurobonds maturing in 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2024 for a total of $300mn. Many Russian assets are under a high risk of sanctions and some companies have been taking advantage of the resulting fall in prices on bonds to buy back their debt cheaply.
The Baikal Mining Company will raise $1.25bn in project financing from a Russian bank by the start of 2019. The company operates Russia’s biggest untapped copper deposit at Udokan.
Russia’s central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina denied any danger to foreign currency deposits in Russian banks, claiming that paying them out in rubles is not being considered even in case
of sanctions as it would undermine the trust in the Russian banning system. The CEO of Russia second-largest state bank VTB Andrei Kostin caused a mild panic earlier, saying the central bank was prepared to possibly introduce limitations on foreign currency operations.
Russia's exports of petroleum products to Belarus declined by 18.4% m/m to 237,000 tonnes in August (down 35.1% compared to June). Recently, Belarus urged Russia not to cancel exports of petroleum products to Belarus, which Moscow argues are not economically viable.
Russian medium-cap retailer O'key announced the appointment of Armin Burger as its new CEO. Prior to the appointment of the new
CEO O'Key posted discouraging results in the first half of 2018 on a pressured market that is running into structural capacity limitations.
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