Putin allowed Rosneft not to return foreign exchange earnings to the country. Should I wait for devaluation now?

Vladimir Putin and Igor Sechin. Photo from the Kremlin website. Archive

Vladimir Putin signed a law that cancels fines for non-repayment of foreign exchange earnings for the sanctions of exporting companies. The only company that this law concerns now is Rosneft. What will happen to the ruble if she decides to leave the currency abroad?

• The government obliged the largest exporters at the end of 2014 to stop export revenue to Russian banks to stop the sharp collapse of the ruble. Vladimir Putin then personally phoned the company with a request to "scrape away on the susks" and sell the currency. As a result, Rosneft, Gazprom, Zarubezhneft, Alrosa and Crystal fell under the law on currency repatriation.
• Now there is a happy exception from this list - Rosneft, the only sanctions company from these five exporters. The cancellation of the requirements for the return of foreign exchange earnings in theory should help a company that, due to sanctions, cannot attract long Western loans, finance its own foreign projects, purchase foreign equipment, extinguish external loans, etc.
• But that Rosneft is good is not always good for everyone else. In mid -July, Analysts of Raiffeisenbank warned that Rosneft was enough to reduce the supply of currency in Russia in the amount of $ 25 to $ 64 billion (depending on whether the company is covered by ruble expenses only due to operational income or using ruble loans). This, in turn, can lead to an increase in currency deficiency in the domestic market and become a new risk factor for the ruble.
• But you should not panic, other analysts surveyed by The Bell call. The law signed by Putin changes the requirements for the repatriation of revenue, but not for its sale, recalls the chief economist of the Russian office Bank of America Merrill Lynch Vladimir Osakarsky. There have been no legislative requirements for the sale of currency in Russia for a long time, so the total amount of currency in the spot market should not change significantly, he said. The analyst Nordea Bank Denis Davydov agrees with this-by the end of the year the bank still predicts the ruble exchange rate in the range of 63-64 rubles./$. Exporters had previously managed to bypass the requirement to repatle foreign exchange earnings, adds Sergey Romanchuk, director of operations in the foreign exchange and monetary market. He, too, does not expect that the ruble will respond to this change.

Close attention to Rosneft is understandable if you recall that in 2014, on the eve of the sharp devaluation of the ruble of the state -owned company, it placed bonds for a record amount of 625 billion rubles within one day. It is impossible to attract so much on the market, experts said in chorus, and even Alexei Kudrin called this deal "extremely opaque." On December 15, Rosneft tried to calm the market, publicly

Irina Malkova