Azerbaijan, Baku, May 26 / Trend, I. Khalilova /
The Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBA) has sufficient stocks of banknotes with nominal of one and five manats to replace the old banknotes, the CBA first deputy chairman Alim Guliyev told journalists on Thursday.
"We have made orders in time and old banknotes removed from the circulation were destroyed," Guliyev said. "We have enough stocks of banknotes in order to put new banknotes into circulation to replace removed backnotes," he added.
Guliyev said within the "clean money policy", banknotes unfit for further use collected in the banking sector are transferred to the Central Bank.
Within the cash concept, work is underway over design and production of banknotes with various nominal.
"We have an idea for producing banknotes with nominal of above 100 manat, which will be introduced over time," Guliyev said.
As a result of the denomination, held by the CB, the old currency was completely replaced by the new one before Dec. 31, 2006. In Azerbaijan, the new banknotes have been used as the only mean of payment since 2007, which helped prevent possible difficulties for commercial and economic facilities in connection with the circulation of 19 denominations at the same time.
The order for the new money amounted to 1.7 billion manta, looking at the stocks for three years. Some 94 percent of the total amount are banknotes (1, 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 manat) and six percent are metal coins (1, 3 , 5, 10, 20 and 50 coins).
The service-life of the banknotes is 3-5 years and for coins it is 20 years. At present, a great burden falls on one and five manat banknotes, so their service life is 1.5 - 2 years, so they are not ruined. Due to this, the CB even considered the possibility of replacing them with metal money, which will be more stable, reducing the burden on them and reducing expenditures.
The official exchange rate is 0.7896 to $1 on May 26.