Russia's credit ratings haven't changed, but politics still play role - Medvedev
MOSCOW. April 20 (Interfax) - The international rating agencies have left their evaluations of Russian unchanged, but those decisions were not made based on economic factors alone: they also contained a political component, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said.
"Despite the extremely negative attitude of these very rating agencies one year ago, this year, against the backdrop of an extensive rating agency review of all the commodities countries, Russia's ratings were left unchanged," Medvedev said at a meeting of the Finance Ministry's collegium.
This might be because Russia's ratings "were artificially low to begin with," he said. "All the same, we are proceeding on the assumption that aside from profoundly economic factors that affect the decisions made by the rating agencies, nonetheless it was impossible to get by without a political component," he said.
