Central Bank against stock market development at cost of increasing risks for future pensioners - Nabiullina

MOSCOW. May 16 (Interfax) - The Central Bank of Russia does not support the development of the stock market at the cost of increasing risks to the funds of future pensioners, Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina said at the National Association of Stock Market Participants (NAUFOR) conference titled "The Russian Stock Market 2025".

"You are proposing, and you said so quite frankly, to develop the stock market at the expense of increasing the risk for future pensioners. We will never agree to this. We remember very well how together we undertook, to put it mildly, to bring back order to non-state pension funds, when pension funds assumed quite a lot of risk. This mechanisms you are proposing to abandon are exactly what insures us against a repeat of that," Nabiullina said, when asked by NAUFOR President Alexei Timofeyev about the possibility of allowing non-state pension funds to take on more risk when investing in shares.

"What does it mean to abandon fiduciary responsibility? It means, for example, a return to the situation of 2018, when individual non-state pension funds bought assets that were clearly unprofitable for future pensioners without any responsibility," she said.

The Central Bank is not going to abandon stress testing, Nabiullina said. "On the contrary, we are going to develop this mechanism, because it means we can ensure that the rights of pensioners will be safeguarded in any difficult situation, even in the event of shocks, of which there can be quite a few," she said.