Yuan liquidity situation remains acute, no prospect of improvement yet - Sberbank

VLADIVOSTOK. Sept 4 (Interfax) - There is still a shortage of Chinese yuan on the Russian market, the situation remains acute and there is no prospect of an improvement yet, Taras Skvortsov, Sberbank senior vice president and head of finance, said.

"As for the situation on the market as a whole, we can assess it from [loan interest] rates. And we see that these rates jump very high, especially towards the end of a month. They are even higher than rates in rubles, several times higher, twice as high, for example. And this obviously suggest the problem remains acute," Skvortsov told reporters on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum.

"Thanks of course to the regulator, because it intervenes on the market at times and helps to put this fire out by raising the swap limit. But on a regular basis there is still a deficit, and rates have risen quite a lot over the year, for example," he said.

"I would not expect the situation to get much better in the near future," he said.

Skvortsov said there were hardly any new loans in yuan due to the liquidity deficit for this currency, and this had been the case for quite a while. The significant amount of yuan loans on the balance sheets of banks this year and at the end of last year was associated with the conversion of debt in dollars and euros into them.

"Today, not so many additional yuan are coming into the Russian economy, and banks still need to maintain a liquidity buffer in yuan in order to issue funds to clients if necessary. So in view of this buffer of available funds for lending, there are either very few of them or hardly any," Skvortsov said.