RUSSIA HAS NO BANKING CRISIS, BELIEVES BUSINESS COMMUNITY

The Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs does not think that Russia has a banking crisis. "On the insurance market up to 20 licenses are revoked every months and nothing happens. Here three banks have encountered problems and we are talking of a crisis. There is no crisis," said the Union's vice president Igor Jurgens. The problems in the banking sector are objective and related to the ongoing banking reform, he believes. "When the reform was being worked out, we said that the 1,500 banks that existed in Russia were too many. For example, 40 banks were registered in the devastated Chechnya alone. What are these banks?" he asks. The reform, he argues, aims at increasing banks' stability. "Capitalization, transparency, stability, reserves in the Central Bank, deposit insurance, that is, everything that makes banks stable is the essence of the reform," Jurgens explained. Those banks that do not comply with the new requirements "will be having difficulties for the reform has been launched," he pointed out. He also disagreed with some experts who believe that the supervisory bodies did not like the banks whose owners had profited from the 1998 crisis. "A conspiracy theory? I do not think so," he said. According to Jurgens, the banking sector encountered objective difficulties, but "they were wrongly commented by the Central Bank's management, which caused misunderstanding among clients". The Central Bank should deal with every separate case "quietly and individually with the owners, but so that clients should not suffer," Jurgens believes.