At the general meeting of Raiffeisen Bank International on Thursday, RBI boss Johann Strobl announced that RBI intends to try to sell or spin off its Russian business. “Both options are relatively unrealistic,” said small investor representative Florian Beckermann in the Ö1 “Morgenjournal”. “There’s certainly nothing to be done before the end of the year,” estimates wiiw director Mario Holzner.
“The current options for an exit are very limited, so that RBI currently has no way of leaving Russia and will stay there and, in consultation with the ECB, is continuing to reduce business there,” said Beckermann, board member of the interest group for investors (IVA). .
Possible buyers of RBI’s Russian business might be, for example, a Chinese or Indian bank that has good relations with the Kremlin, Holzner said in the “Morgenjournal”. However, according to experts, the company’s value is estimated by a Russian government commission and the buyer is only allowed to pay 50 percent of it to the seller. According to Holzner, there are also ten percent that are to be handed over directly to the Russian state. In any case, a quick RBI withdrawal from Russia is out of the question. “There’s certainly nothing to be done before the end of the year.”
Therefore, RBI now has to make it credible that business in Russia will continue to decrease. In the past year, she has already reduced around 30 percent of loans to Russian institutions and companies in Russia. In itself, the business there is very profitable, the profits in Russia would have made up around 60 percent of the RBI group. “Meanwhile, all the larger European and American companies that are still on site carry out their transfers largely via the RBI to the West via the Swift system.” However, these profits might not currently be withdrawn from Russia. But even if this business had to be written off to a large extent, this would not pose a threat to RBI, as it had sufficient equity reserves.
