The upcoming opening of a regional office of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) in Moscow will help Russia to have a better understanding of how to secure funding for its projects, Russian Deputy Finance Minister Sergey Storchak told Sputnik on Thursday
BRASILIA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 14th November, 2019) The upcoming opening of a regional office of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) in Moscow will help Russia to have a better understanding of how to secure funding for its projects, Russian Deputy Finance Minister Sergey Storchak told Sputnik on Thursday.
Earlier in the day, Sputnik exclusively covered the signing ceremony of the agreement between Russia and NDB to open the bank's regional office. According to NDB President Kundapur Vaman Kamath, it is due to be launched within the next two-three months.
"It is important that [Russia's] federal executive branch agencies understand their capabilities, and the presence of the office will certainly help to understand how the bank functions, what it could do, and what kind of prohibitions and limitations it has. What kind of opportunities there are in terms of price and duration of those loans as the bank helps with the issues of long-term loans. These issues will be resolved depending on the desire and the aspirations of the [NDB] headquarters' management in achieving a balanced structure of a loan portfolio," Storchak said.
There are chances that Russia will boost the portfolio of its NDB-invested projects after the office starts functioning, as currently the majority of loans issued by the bank are going toward the Indian and Chinese projects, sparking a certain amount of frustration among other BRICS member states, the deputy minister added.
"Identification of projects in different jurisdictions takes place at different paces and with different positive outcomes. In this sense, it greatly depends on the situation with the national economy and national governance. It is by no means the fault of the bank itself or its management. Rather, it is the shareholders who should address the claims as to why they are not actively working on identifying projects that could be financed in accordance with the bank's internal policies. They succeeded because the headquarters is located in China plus the economic management system itself dictated that our colleagues from the People's Republic of China have been faster and more energetic in identifying the projects," Storchak underlined.
On Wednesday, Brazilian Minister of Infrastructure Tarcisio Gomes de Freitas said that Brasilia was "bothered" by the BRICS bank unevenly distributing funds among its member states. The NDB, with an estimated $13 billion worth of funds reserved for various ventures, invested most of them into India and China, while the amount of funds approved for projects in Russia, Brazil and South Africa was significantly lower.
