MOSCOW, November 26. /TASS/. Russia’s Central Bank has carried out a considerable part of work to clean up the domestic banking system from dishonest players, Central Bank Chief Elvira Nabiullina said on Wednesday.
“The work for cleaning up the banking sector must be done to avoid more serious problems, which is necessary to protect depositors’ interests,” Nabiullina said in the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia’s parliament.
“As of today, we can state that a considerable part of this work has already been done,” she said, adding the regulator had revoked 32 banking licenses in 2013 and 80 licenses this year.
Highly risky credit policies and dubious operations are the main causes for banking license revocations, she said.
The large-scale effort to clean up the domestic banking sector from inefficient operators started with the appointment of Nabiullina as the Central Bank chief in June 2013. The efforts aim to make the country’s banking system financially healthy and resilient to market shocks.
The regulator has paid special attention to financial institutions that are not large in size and conduct risky operations and violate capital adequacy and transparency requirements.
The Central Bank head has said a decision on license revocation is an “extreme measure” when all the other methods of “influence on a particular bank have been used up.