October 12, 2009, 02:55 / Finance

Banks will have to reveal their owners

It will be possible to find out who owns the bank or determines its decisions starting from the new year on the Central Bank website. Banks can continue to conceal this information, but then they risk losing the right to attract deposits from the public Vasily Kudinov

Public information about bank owners could attract the attention of criminals to them, bankers fear / Reuters

A draft regulation regulating the procedure for disclosing information on the Central Bank website about persons who have a significant (direct or indirect) influence on the decisions of bank management bodies is posted on the Bank of Russia website. The Central Bank promises not only to publish the information provided by banks, but also to compare it with the data it already has, and will require either clarification of the information or an explanation of the discrepancy.

Disclosure of real owners has become one of the requirements when selecting banks for the deposit insurance system. However, bankers provided this information only to the Central Bank. But at the end of last year, amendments were adopted to the law on deposit insurance; now banks are required to disclose information about those who own them or predetermine their decisions to an unlimited number of people. The Central Bank will especially monitor how banks disclose such information. In order for a bank to retain the right to accept deposits from the public, the Central Bank must give it a “satisfactory” rating for disclosure. The same assessment should be made for the other five groups of indicators taken into account when assessing financial stability (see sidebar).

The innovation is that the information will not only be on the website of a particular bank, but will be collected on the website of the Central Bank, explains the chairman of the board and owner of Akibank Ildar Galyautdinov. He sees one negative aspect: public information about the owners of the bank can attract the attention of criminals to them, especially in the regions. The disclosure of information about the owner did not affect the personal life or work of the bank, clients knew this, said the president and owner of Avangard Bank, Kirill Minovalov, but refused to comment on the disclosure of Avangard on the Central Bank website.

In the draft regulation, the Central Bank gave an example of disclosing only co-owners of banks, but decisions can be influenced by the largest clients and creditors, warns Galyautdinov. “We see how officials at different levels are trying to force banks, primarily state-owned, to issue loans,” says an independent director of a large bank. He doubts that his bank will disclose such facts.

The Central Bank representative limited himself to saying that feedback from bankers is being collected until October 19.