Baku, Azerbaijan, April 18
By Anvar Mammadov – Trend:
Over the past years, 12 banks, which have been authorized organizations of the National Fund for Entrepreneurship Support (NFES) of Azerbaijan, were closed in the country, NFES Executive Director Shirzad Abdullayev said at a press conference on April 18.
Abdullayev said that the total amount of the NFES funds in these banks was 200 million manats.
A part of this amount has already been returned to the Azerbaijan Deposit Insurance Fund (ADIF), which acts as the liquidator of these banks, according to Abdullayev.
"Presently, we are negotiating return of these funds or transfer of loans to other authorized banks [of the NFES]. Over 40 million manats of soft loans serviced by the closed banks have already been returned to ADIF. Ten million manats were directly transferred to our treasury account. Furthermore, we are also working on transfer of the remaining loans to other banks. We have already reached a preliminary agreement," said Abdullayev.
Speaking about the NFES funds in Demirbank, Abdullayev said that the Fund issued soft loans for 40 million manats through the bank.
"We have already appealed to ADIF and Azerbaijan’s Financial Markets Supervisory Authority (FIMSA) so that they allow transferring the loans on these projects to other banks. All the projects are ongoing, payments on loans are timely returned to ADIF," Abdullayev said.
NFES was established in 1992. To date, about 35,000 entrepreneurs have been granted soft loans worth 2.1 billion manats for realization of projects worth 4.7 billion manats.