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The Regions This Week
January 25, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 7
Eastern Europe
The EU is proposing Russia guarantee 60bn cubic metres of gas transits from Russia to the EU via the Ukraine after the current contract expires at the end of this year, as negotiation over a new transit deal open. Trilateral talks between Ukraine, Russia and the EU on gas transit from Russia to the EU via Ukraine started on January 22 and immediately stalled. No deal is likely this year.
US-based private equity fund management com- pany Horizon Capital raised $200mn for its
third Ukraine fund, exceeding the original goal of $150mn. “It is sending a message to the market that there are companies who want to invest long term capital in Ukraine,” Lenna Koszarny, Horizon’s CEO, said of the 10-year fund. “There is so much demand we are turning investors away.”
Over half of Russians have no interest in politics and are disappointed by the results politicians deliver, according to independent pollster the Lev- ada Center. Only a quarter of the population (25%) say they are ready to more or less actively partici- pate in politics, and almost three-quarters of the country's citizens (74%) consider themselves not ready.
Ukrainian presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the comedian-actor turned presiden- tial competitor, has active business in Russia, disproving his claim that he stopped in 2014 when Russia launched its military aggression in Ukraine.
The Central Bank of Russia published its latest external debt estimates, which showed Russia’s external debt contracting by $16.5bn in the fourth quarter of 2018 and $64bn over the full year 2018, to $453bn. While some of the decline was attribut- able to the revaluation effect, most of it owed to the continued deleveraging of the private sector.
The Russian population put in its first full-year decline in a decade, with net migration failing to offset the natural decline for the first time since
2008. The population of Russia as of January 1, 2019 was 146,793,744 people, reports Rosstat, down from 146,880,432 at the beginning of 2018.
Ukraine’s 2018 retail sales increased 6.1% y/y in real terms, slowing slightly from 6.5% y/y in 2017, Ukraine’s State Statistics Service reported.
Battered Belarus faces a new economic crisis if Minsk fails to secure full compensation from Rus- sia for losses triggered by the latter’s new energy taxation system (the so-called tax manoeuvre), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in its latest economic outlook. Belarus has $7bn in gross inter- national reserves (GIR) but could lose up to $11bn in the coming years as a result of the change in Russian taxes.
Uzbekistan's trade with Russia increased by 21.2% in 2018 compared to the previous year and reached $5.73bn, the Uzbek State Committee on Statistics said. According to the statistics, Uzbeki- stan's exports to Russiahit $2.2bn last year, rising by 6. 8% year-on-year, while the country's imports of Russian goods skyrocketed by 30.6% and to- talled $3.5bn.
Indebted Russian steel-maker Mechel refinanced a syndicated pre-export finance foreign investors pool of $1bn. This was made possible by the open- ing of a credit line in euro by Russian state-owned bank VTB with repayment due in April 2022.
The Russian-Chinese Investment Fund (RCIF) is mulling the sale of its 14.03% stake in Russia’s leading children’s toy chain Detsky Mir, Interfax reported.
American oil firm Schlumberger is prepared to walk away from a deal to acquire shares of Rus- sian firm Eurasia Drilling Co. (EDC) if the Russian authorities don't signal intent to accept its offer in coming weeks, Vedomosti reported. This deal has been dragging on for years and got caught up in the Kremlin’s fight with Washington.