Baku, Azerbaijan, June 27
By Fakhri Vakilov –Trend:
The International Finance Corporation (IFC) will help the Ipoteka Bank of Uzbekistan to become a modern commercial bank and it plans to become the bank shareholder, Trend reports with reference to the Ministry of Finance of Uzbekistan.
IFC and the bank agreed to cooperate during the visit of the President of Uzbekistan to the United States in 2017. Following the visit, they began work on the project on “Creating the foundations of a modern commercial bank” with the involvement of 14 international experts. The experts participated in developing a plan for institutional transformations in the institution and recommendations for improving its corporate governance and risk management system.
As the next step, IFC will allocate a loan of $35 million, which can later be partially or entirely converted into shares. In this case, the International Finance Corporation will become a shareholder of Ipoteka Bank.
The main conditions for the disbursement of the funds were approved by the IFC Credit Committee in April, and the final decision is to be made this month.
To ensure the independence of Ipoteka Bank, by the end of 2020, a new composition of the supervisory board of the bank will be formed without the participation of heads of state bodies.
The number of independent directors will be brought to five, and the chairman of the supervisory board will be elected from among them. Ipoteka-Bank receives the right to make independent decisions on the issues of crediting and financing projects, “based on market conditions”.
State shares in the authorized capital of Ipoteka-Bank are transferred to the Ministry of Finance within two months free of charge. As expected, the state share in the authorized capital of the bank will be below 50 percent by the end of 2022.
This is the first project of this scale in the domestic financial sector.
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