RIA NOVOSTI. The Bank of Russia is prepared to support a proposal made by State Duma members to insure funds held on accounts of individual entrepreneurs at Russian banks through the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA), but is not ready to extend this mechanism to CBR payments made after the revocation of a license from a
Addressing a meeting held by the State Duma’s Committee for Financial Markets, Sukhov noted that at present CBR has the right to ban lenders being beyond DI to attract deposits, but cannot prohibit individual entrepreneurs to open accounts at such banks. Rub 700,000.00 insurance is applicable to each deposit of an individual. The similar insurance indemnity is proposed to be introduced for individual entrepreneurs.
As DIA deputy general director Andrey Melnikov said at the meeting, individual entrepreneurs hold around Rub 87 bln on accounts with Russian lending institutions. In addition, funds subject to insurance indemnity total Rub 25—30 bln. “I would rather vote for the draft law, although it doesn’t look like anything that was insured before," Melnikov said.
One of the draft law’s authors, Duma member Pavel Medvedev, explained these funds were not initially insured, therefore the first version of the law on deposit insurance was drafted with great efforts. “The initial law was compiled so difficult that its authors were prepared to reject anything, but to retain its primary part…the main thing is to safeguard depositor rights," he noted.
At the same time deputy head of the finance ministry’s finance policy department Vladimir Lukov said his ministry supports the draft law as a whole, but requested to pay attention to such categories of individual entrepreneurs as lawyers and public notaries. “In this case it is difficult to divide funds of individuals and legal entities," he pointed out.
In turn head of the State Duma committee Vladislav Reznik said that, in his opinion, initially the law was created not to protect entrepreneurs’ accounts. “Maybe it would be better to wait a bit and increase insurance indemnity for all parties," he thinks. Furthermore, he said the adoption of the draft law will marginally, but ultimately increase the burden of banks.
