MOSCOW, March 21 (Itar-Tass) – The outlook for creating a BRICS bank will be clear within days, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Thursday.
“We are on the threshold of making an official decision on that score,” he said. “There will be clarity on the issue within several days from now.”
About the possibility of creating a secretariat of that organization, Ryabkov said that BRICS “does not stimulate processes of the association’s institutional emergence.”
“There is an opportunity to work effectively without creating some bureaucratic superstructures and secretariats that have no idea what their mission is,” he said. “Within BRICS the work is proceeding without a secretariat.”
“We are contemplating a virtual secretariat, though,” the senior diplomat explained. In his opinion this is necessary to create what he described as “an institution of the group’s memory, for those who may need it.”
Ryabkov believes that “in due course some small permanent secretariat may prove necessary, but the temporal frames are not very tight and there should be no dictating. This is against the practices and culture of cooperation within BRICS.”
“The coincidence of interests in the organization is rather high,” he said. “This is the basis for work in concert and in many directions.”