Azerbaijan, Baku, Aug.19 / Trend, N. Ismayilova /
Russian Agricultural Bank is interested in entering Azerbaijan's banking market, the Russian Agricultural Bank's representative office head Bakhtiyar Agayev said at a press conference. March 16, 2010, Tax Ministry of Azerbaijan registered Russian Agricultural Representative Office in the Republic of Azerbaijan, and official permission to open a representative office was received from the Central Bank of Azerbaijan June 21.
"We are actively exploring the country's banking market in order to establish contacts with credit organizations and potential customers of the bank", Agayev said.
He said RusAg's Baku Representative Office is established to facilitate the development of bilateral business ties and strengthening of trade, economic, scientific and technological relations between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Azerbaijan, informing the country's business circles on issues of cooperation with the Bank through workshops, conferences, roundtables, briefings, Russian investment projects' promotion in Azerbaijan with participation of the bank.
"Russian Agricultural Bank's representative office is aimed to obtain the branch status soon, which will be able to fully engage in lending of agriculture, and is interested in it," Agayev said.
Bilateral economic ties between Russia and Azerbaijan have a progressive motion in trade and economic, scientific-technical and humanitarian development. The amount of trade turnover between the two countries in 2008 amounted to $2.4 billion. The share of agricultural products in total import was 53.5 percent, and export - 22.6 percent.
In 2009, the amount of trade turnover between the countries was at $,816 billion. According to Azerbaijan's statistics, the trade turnover last year fell by six percent, according to the Russian side - by 25 percent.
The Russian Agricultural Bank's main purpose is to provide affordable, qualitative and effective satisfaction of the needs of agricultural commodity producers and Russia's rural population in banking products and services, every kind of assistance to formation and functioning of a modern national lending and financial system of Russia's agro-industrial sector, support to the development of agriculture and rural areas of the Russian Federation.
Russian Agricultural Bank now actively expands its presence in neighboring countries. In 2009, RusAg opened three representative offices - namely, in Belarus, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan.
There are representative offices of the Latvian Parex Bank, Commerz Bank Germanic and Turkish joint stock company Citibank in the Republic.