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Belinvestbank will be sold to an EU bank, National Bank head says

Belinvestbank will be sold to a large bank in the European Union, Pyotr Prakapovich, head of the National Bank of Belarus, told reporters in Minsk on Thursday, as quoted by BelaPAN.

“This is a bank with large capabilities, which ranks among the world’s top 20 banks,” Mr. Prakapovich said.

“We could have sold Belinvestabk a long time ago,” he said. “But we don’t need to just sell it. We need a strategic investor who can invest billions of euros in the development of the bank.”

According to him, the main partners of Belarus in the banking sphere are banks in Russia, other member countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States and members countries of the European Union. “At present we have about 10 banks involving Russian and CIS capital and only two banks involving EU capital. This is disparity,” Mr. Prakapovich said.

Belarus is in talks for Chinese banks to come into the country’s banking sector, but they are not yet willing to do so, Mr. Prakapovich noted. “They begin operations when certain conditions are in place, when a certain volume of trade is in place,” he said. “I think we’ll have such a volume in a year or two.”