BEIJING, September 10. /ITAR-TASS/. Russia and China are discussing an issue of increasing the term of Chinese loans in national currency for Russian businesses from the current period of one year to the period of four or five years, Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said on Wednesday.

“The loans in yuans are currently permitted for the periods for up to one year only,” Shuvalov said in an interview with ITAR-TASS. “We have discussed today the possibility of increasing the term to four or five years.”

Shuvalov said the issue was not about the discrimination of the Russian business as such terms are in force to all foreign companies.

“We are telling our partners, however, to make a proper product and agree on terms, which would be beneficial for the mutual banking assimilation and mutual banking operations,” Shuvalov said.

The high-ranking Russian official that the issue would be thoroughly considered by a working group at a planned session, which will take place in the coming weeks.

Shuvalov said that at the session “Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Moiseyev will discuss these issues with his Chinese counterpart.”

Shuvalov is also a co-chairmen of the recently set up Russian-Chinese investment cooperation commission, which held its inaugural session in China’s Beijing on Tuesday and with the focus on the mooted national currency swaps.

An initiative to set up a bilateral commission on investment cooperation at the level of Russian and Chinese first deputy prime ministers was put forward following an official visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to China in May.

Last month the Central Bank of Russia announced that the Russian and Chinese monetary regulators agreed a draft document on national currency swaps.

The press service of the Russian monetary regulator said in early August that the volume of national currency swaps and the time of their launch would depend on the demand for this instrument adding that the swap agreement would boost the potential for using Russian rubles and Chinese yuans in trade settlements.

Russian President Vladimir Putin put forward an idea in Shanghai in May this year to create new mechanisms for managing Russia’s and China’s foreign exchange reserves to help make the ruble and yuan more resilient and contribute to better stability of the global financial architecture.

A currency swap is a foreign exchange transaction for the simultaneous purchase and sale of a specific amount of one currency in exchange for another currency with two different settlement dates. A currency swap is a wide-spread foreign exchange instrument, which has a larger share in market turnover than spot and forward transactions.