Sanctioned Russian subsidiary banks in Kazakhstan have enough liquidity - regulator

NUR-SULTAN. June 9 (Interfax) - The subsidiaries of the sanctioned Russian banks in Kazakhstan have enough liquidity and are quite solvent, said Madina Abylkasymova, who chairs the Kazakh Agency for Regulation and Development of the Financial Market.

"The banks [Subsidiary Bank Sberbank JSC, Subsidiary Bank Alfa-Bank JSC and Subsidiary Organization Bank VTB JSC] are fulfilling all their liabilities to individuals and legal entities. They are solvent and quite stable," Abylkasymova said in the Senate, the upper chamber of the Kazakh parliament.

These banks have always had high-quality loan portfolios and a sufficient level of liquidity, she said.

"The banks have been satisfying all requests of the clients for money transfer to other Kazakh banks," Abylkasymova said.

The loan portfolios of the three banks total about 1.7 trillion tenge in value, and liquidity around 590 billion tenge.

Since the sanctions were introduced against the Russian banks, there has been an outflow of deposits from their Kazakhstan-based subsidiaries to local financial institutions. To date, the Russian subsidiary banks in Kazakhstan still hold 500 billion tenge worth of individual and corporate deposits, according to Abylkasymova.

The Kazakhstan-based subsidiaries of the Russian banks VTB , Alfa-Bank and Sberbank were put on the U.S. sanctions list in March of this year.

Bank CenterCredit announced it had completed the acquisition of 100% of Alfa-Bank's subsidiary in Kazakhstan in May 2022.

Also, the subsidiaries of Russia's banks in Kazakhstan, Sberbank and VTB, are trying to find investors in order to change their owners, Abylkasymova said earlier.

The subsidiaries of Sberbank, Alfa-Bank and VTB in Kazakhstan were ranked second, 11th and 13th, respectively, by assets among the 22 second-tier banks operating in Kazakhstan As at May 1, 2022, according to the National Bank.