One third of loans in Kazakhstan banks are "bad"

One third of the loans in Kazakhstan banks are tagged “bad”, deputy chairman of Kazakhstan National Bank Daniyar Akishev told the Majilis (Lower Chamber of the Parliament) deputies, Tengrinews.kz reports. “The share of bad loans including hopeless loans in fact exceeds 30 percent, I am confirming this,” Akishev said. Akishev added that “dynamics does not demonstrate improvement.” He told the deputies that measures are being taken to change the situation. First of all, the National Bank uses specilly designed leverages and tools allowing financial institutes to write such loans off its balances or transfer them to managing companies which will deal with the bad loans and clean up the banks' balances. The second method is bailing the bad loans from the second-tier banks as part of the effort to improve the quality of assets of second-tier banks. The National Bank established a toxic assets fund for this purpose. It will start operating after several amendments aer introduced into the Tax Code. What concerns foreign debts of the banks, the situation has stabilized, according to Abishev. Foreign loans are not increasing and the foreign debt of the country consists mainly of inter-company debts (debts of parent companies to affiliated companies in oil and gas sector) and debts quasi-public companies and makes the total of $119 billion as of April 1, 2011. By Maksim Popov