EBRD may buy stake in Azerbaijani companies

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is discussing the possibility of acquiring a stake in four Azerbaijani companies, the head of the EBRD Baku office Neil McCain said May 8 at a press conference.

“In addition, in case of consolidation of banks, we are ready to participate in their equity,” he said. “We were also discussing this issue with the head of the Central Bank of Azerbaijan Elman Rustamov.”

He said the EBRD has a stake in six companies of Azerbaijan, three of which are banks.

“As you know, the EBRD has a stake in three banks - AccessBank, Unibank and DemirBank,” said the head of the Baku office. “At the same time, we lend to six banks. All these nine banks meet the requirements of the Central Bank of the minimum amount of aggregate capital. They have exemplary financial indexes. We will continue to provide these banks out support in case of future risks due to changes in exchange rate of manat.”

McCain said that the depreciation of the national currency rate is a normal phenomenon that has occurred in other countries of the region as well. “I think the banks should be ready for such changes,” he said.

The EBRD has allocated $2.5 billion to finance 146 projects in various sectors of the economy since the beginning of cooperation with Azerbaijan. One of the EBRD’s main tasks is to ensure the stable development of Azerbaijan's non-oil sector by investing in small and medium private enterprises.

Azerbaijan is the largest recipient of the EBRD funds in the Caucasus, as well as one of the largest - in the CIS and Eastern Europe.

The EBRD invested 238 million euros in the implementation of 21 projects in Azerbaijan in 2014.

On February 21, Central Bank has established rate of the manat to the US dollar at 1.05 manats per dollar (compared to 0.7844 manats earlier), which corresponds to the cheapening of rate by 33.9 percent. In this case, the official rate of the euro to the manat consolidated by 33.8 percent - up to 1,195 manats.

/By Trend/