Gabala, Azerbaijan, June 24
By Zulfiyya Gurbanova and Emin Aliyev - Trend:
The quality of Azerbaijani banks' loan portfolio has returned to the pre-crisis level, Azerbaijani Central Bank (CBA) Director General, Rashad Orujov said on June 24.
Orujov made the remarks at a roundtable meeting titled 'Development of inter-bank cooperation between Russia and Azerbaijan' as part of the 5th Azerbaijani-Russian interregional cooperation forum, held in the city of Gabala.
"The loan portfolio's quality is very good - the bad loans do not exceed 6 percent, this is quite a low figure. The important thing is that reserves have already been created on 80 percent of such loans, and we can say that, in fact, the share of unmanaged loans is about 2 percent, and we returned back to the figures of 2008. Given the capital cushion existing in the banks, we can say that the situation is not just good, but perfect," Orujov said.
He said that in late 2013 the CBA decided to increase the minimum capital requirements for banks from 10 million AZN to 50 million AZN, following which the banks' capital base was raised by 76 percent.
"It is good that this growth was achieved through stable sources, mainly through share capital. The capital of the country's banks more than doubled in five years and reached 3.6 billion AZN," Orujov added.
There are 44 banks in Azerbaijan. One of them is semi state-run [state participation in the capital of the International Bank of Azerbaijan (IBA) is 50.2 percent].
The official exchange rate is 0.7843 AZN/USD as of June 24.
Edited by CN
