BAKU, Azerbaijan, January 25. Azerbaijan Entrepreneurship Development Fund has adopted new lending mechanisms for business entities in the liberated territories, the fund’s Board Chairman Osman Khaliyev said during a press conference on the results of 2022, Trend reports.
According to Khaliyev, the entity loan portfolio has been formed at the level of 500 million manat ($294.1 million).
"Within this mechanism, we allocated 450 million manat ($264.7 million) for state guarantees and 150 million manat ($88.2 million) for subsidies," he explained.
The official stressed that the maximum amount of a concessional loan that can be issued to a business entity in Azerbaijan’s Karabakh is five million manat ($2.9 million).
Khaliyev added that 90 percent of the issued loans could be guaranteed by the state, and the interest rate should not exceed 15 percent.
In 2022, the Entrepreneurship Development Fund allocated 104.2 million manat ($61.29 million) in concessional loans to 2,710 small and medium-sized projects.
The Azerbaijan Entrepreneurship Development Fund public entity was established by the Decree of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev dated July 31, 2018.
The main objectives of the fund are to improve the support mechanism for entrepreneurship development, create new production and processing enterprises based on innovative technologies in the non-oil sector, ensure the financing of export operations, accelerate investments in the real sector and expand access to financial resources of business units operating in the private sector.