Vedomosti: "Save VEB"
Yevgenia Pismennaya
VEB wants nearly 1 trillion roubles from Government
The state-run Vnesheconombank (VEB), through which the government is helping victims of the crisis, is asking Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to give it 950 billion roubles ($34.16 billion). The money is needed to help VEB itself.
Vladimir Dmitriyev, VEB's chairman, told journalists recently that the Government was looking into the possibility of increasing VEB's authorised capital by several hundred billion roubles, calling the requested sum "adequate." Two government officials told the Vedomosti newspaper that on November 6, Mr Dmitriyev wrote a letter to Mr Putin, who chairs the bank's supervisory board, containing a request to increase VEB's authorised capital by 950 billion roubles.
Mr Putin instructed First Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Kudrin, Central Bank head Sergey Ignatyev, and Economic Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina to present a report on this issue by December 6. Mr Dmitriyev refused to confirm or deny the letter story.
Now, VEB's authorised capital equals 262.5 billion roubles ($9.44 billion), while all of the corporation's investment projects have not exceeded 180 billion roubles. However, in recent months VEB has been converted into an agency for saving Russian companies and the stock market from the crisis. In November alone, an additional 75 billion roubles was contributed to VEB's authorised capital from the budget "to implement measures for support of the financial market." This is not all. VEB has direct access to 450 billion roubles and $50 billion of international reserves, from which the corporation issues loans to companies and their owners hit by the crisis. Besides this, VEB received another 175 billion roubles to support the stock market.
However, Mr Dmitriyev says that the fight against the crisis, and the granting of subordinated loans and operations on the stock market in particular, have affected VEB itself. Kirill Parfenov, president of the Banking Accountants Club, confirms that investments in other banks' capital (including subordinated loans) decrease the banks' own funds by the same amounts, and that operations on the stock market can also reduce their capital during the revaluation of their securities portfolio. Mr Parfenov believes that VEB's request is reasonable. A VEB spokesman adds to this that a negative revaluation result has led Standard & Poor and Fitch to downgrade VEB's ratings to negative.
However, neither Mr Dmitriyev nor VEB's representatives can explain where the sum of 950 billion roubles has come from. VEB does not insist on forming its entire capital from money funds. "A part of the obligations could be secured by state guarantees," VEB's chairman said, though officials say that Mr Dmitriyev did not mention state guarantees in his letter.
Russia's total international reserves, including the fund, equal $449.9 billion, which means that VEB is asking for more than 7.5% of the country's total reserves. Theoretically, there is money (over 3.6 trillion roubles) in the national welfare fund, a Finance Ministry official says. Another official from the Finance Ministry thinks that the sum requested by VEB is too large and it is not clear where it could be taken from. In connection with the tax novelties promised by the prime minister and the forthcoming recalculation of the budget, the reserve fund's money will go toward covering the budget deficit, he said. The Economic Development Ministry and the Central Bank refused to comment.
(Nadezhda Ivanitskaya, Anna Baraulina and Vasily Kudinov helped in preparation of this article)
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A new deputy chairman may appear at VEB to monitor the crisis trends, a government source said. The source named Vasily Kirpichev, VEB's former employee, now head of a Dresdner Kleinwort department, as a possible candidate. Mr Kirpichev has neither confirmed nor denied that he received an offer to work at VEB. "If I receive this proposal, I will gladly examine it," he said.
