Baku, Azerbaijan, June 9
By Azad Hasanli - Trend:
The World Bank is calling for accelerating reforms in Azerbaijan's financial sector, WB leading expert in finance and private sector in the South Caucasus, Angela Prigozhina told Trend.
"The actions of the Financial Market Supervisory Authority of Azerbaijan, aimed at increasing capital, transparency, corporate governance of the banking system, reforming the financial reporting system, risk management and tightening supervision of financial institutions in accordance with international practices and standards, are key factors in the resumption of [growth of] lending to the economy and increasing the confidence of the people and investors in banks. Therefore, the World Bank supports Azerbaijan in these reforms and recommends to accelerate them in order to improve the stability of the financial sector and to attract investment into the economy," Prigozhina said.
Unfortunately, the expert continued, the progress of some reforms slowed down due to changes in the legislation in mid-2017, which led to a decrease in the powers and/or independence of the key participants of the financial stability system, namely FIMSA, the Azerbaijan Deposit Insurance Fund and the Central Bank.
"We would be glad to see progress in the adoption of new important laws, such as a special law on regulation of financial markets, which is designed to modernize the regulation and expand the powers and independence of FIMSA in accordance with the international standards mandatory for regulators around the world," she told Trend.
Nevertheless, Prigozhina positively assessed the actions of the economic section of the Government of Azerbaijan over the past few years.
"In many areas, significant measures were taken in 2015-2017, which allowed preventing further negative phenomena in the economy, to achieve greater stability and positive economic growth in 2017. The actions of FIMSA, the Government, the Central Bank, the Azerbaijan Deposit Insurance Fund and the Financial Stability Board in responding to the financial crisis are commendable. Many decisions were painful and fiscally expensive, but they were critical to support the people, to restore confidence and to improve the stability of the financial sector, to remove the insolvent financial institutions from market in order to reduce future losses," she said.
---
Follow the author on Twitter: @AzadHasanli