Baku, Azerbaijan, May 5
By Anvar Mammadov - Trend:
Reducing the rate of manat has not led to an increase in the number of problem loans of the Azerbaijani AGBank OJSC, the Chairman of the Board Azer Movsumov told Trend May 5.
He said that the reason for this lies in the fact that the bank did not give a large number of loans in foreign currency.
"Reducing the rate of manat has influenced the banks that gave loans mainly in foreign currency," he said. "We always gave out loans in the national currency and continue to do so."
It is too early to judge what impact depreciation of the currency had on banks according to the state of the assets and liabilities, since little time has passed, according to Movsumov. "Today I cannot say that the depreciation has strongly affected our bank," he said.
The chairman of the Board said that the bank has no plans to revise its strategy due to changes in the national currency. "We have always diversified our portfolio, including the credit one, so the change of rate did not affect us," said Movsumov.
The Central Bank changed the rate of the national currency, having set it at 1.05 manats per dollar on February 21 (against 0.7844 manats earlier), which corresponds to the cheapening of rate by 33.9 percent.
Edited by CN
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