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Russia’s Oil and Gas Giants Seek Govt Support
Four biggest oil and gas companies of Russia – LUKOIL, Rosneft, TNK-BP and Gazprom – have addressed the government, seeking loans to pay off foreign debts, Interfax reported, specifying that the oil giants are willing to raise loans under the market terms.
LUKOIL counts on raising from $2 billion to $5 billion. Vagit Alekperov, president of Russia's second largest oil producer LUKOIL, made the respective statement in the interview with Reuters, the Oil Information Agency of Interfax (Interfax-ANI) reported with reference to the sources with LUKOIL press service.
As to the country’s banking system, the RF leadership spares no efforts to rescue it against the financial turmoil. Central Bank of Russia (CBR) will grant unsecured loans to roughly a hundred of banks, First Vice Premier, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin announced on Tuesday. “CBR will provide access not to 28 banks as Finance Ministry, but to around 100 banks, materially widening the list,” Kudrin told the reporters.
Meanwhile, the government’s foreign exchange assets narrowed by $25.569 billion to $556.069 billion by October 1. The assets equaled $581.638 billion as of September 1, the CBR reported. The August loss reached $14.3 billion.
The reduction could be attributed to the CBR efforts to sustain the national currency in the environment of capital outflow and depreciation of Russia’s ruble and to the general revaluation of the assets in the wake of the euro depreciation. At the same time, quite a number of analysts regard the government’s foreign exchange assets as the key source of the state support in time when the financial crisis intensifies worldwide.
www.kommersant.com
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