[For New York see below] Rival Ideas for Cyprus Aid Pop Up in Russia 20 March 2013 | Issue 5091 By Anatoly Medetsky http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/rival-ideas-for-cyprus-aid-pop-up-in-russia/477171.html
The sudden prospect that billions of dollars of Russian money might never return to its owners, due to part of the Cyprus bailout plan, evoked a slate of proposals here Tuesday to prevent the damage. VTB, the country's second-largest lender, which has a subsidiary in Cyprus, laid out a plan to rival that of the European Union. Other ideas came from Gazprombank and a prominent lawyer. The EU-backed idea is for Cyprus to levy a tax on corporate and private deposits in its banks to contribute to the EU bailout. Russians account for a large portion of the deposits and stand to see $2 billion to $3 billion wiped out as a result of the move. As the Cypriot parliament prepared to debate the tax Tuesday, VTB chairman Sergei Dubinin said Cyprus should instead nationalize the banks that teeter on the verge of bankruptcy and hire European managers, including ones from Russia, to run them. "The responsibility for the state of the banking business must lie primarily with those who took the risks of the business, that is, the owners and shareholders of the banks," Dubinin said in a statement released Tuesday. As the next step, these banks should split each deposit into portions that are available to draw immediately and at a later time, over a period of up to 15 years, he said. Gazprombank is ready to come to the aid of Cyprus in exchange for the rights to develop the island's offshore gas fields, Vedomosti reported Tuesday, citing sources at the lender and its biggest shareholder, Gazprom. The sources did not say how much money the bank could provide. Russian banking regulations would ban the lender from issuing a loan of more than 25 percent of its equity to a single borrower, which would cap the potential Gazprombank loan at $3 billion. Cyprus is looking to collect about 6 billion euros ($7.7 billion) if it imposes the tax. Europe is willing to give another 10 billion euros for the bailout. Cyprus estimates its reserves at 3.4 billion cubic meters of gas and 235 million metric tons of oil, and the fields are well positioned for exports to Europe. Dmitry Afanasiev, chairman of law firm Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasiev & Partners, said the ideal lender to provide the loan would be VEB, the government's development bank. The lender could secure the loan with the rights to Cypriot gas reserves, as well as real estate and bank stocks, he said. VEB could then issue securities backed with the assets, Afanasiev told The Moscow Times. The plan is common for developing economies that seek to raise money, he said. The law firm, he said, helped restructure aluminum company RusAl's $17 billion debt following the 2008 global economic meltdown. ****** On the paper Walking Back from Cyprus Lee Buchheit & Mitu Gulati March 18, 2013 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2235359 Reuters reports: Debt expert advises stretching Cypriot bonds, CDs for depositors BERLIN, March 19 | Tue Mar 19, 2013 6:01am EDT Reuters) - One of the world's leading experts on debt restructurings has proposed extending the maturities of Cypriot sovereign bonds and giving uninsured depositors in its banks certificates of deposit (CDs) as a solution to the Mediterranean island's crisis. In a paper entitled "Walking Back from Cyprus", Lee Buchheit of New York law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton and his frequent collaborator, Mitu Gulati of Duke Law School, say European governments "trespassed on consecrated ground" with their plan to impose a levy on insured depositors in Cyprus. They sketch out an alternative which would protect savers with deposits under 100,000 euros ($130,000) and grant those above that level 5-10 year interest-bearing bank CDs corresponding to the amount of their savings in excess of the insured threshold. In addition, the maturities of all sovereign bonds would be extended by a fixed number of years, for example five. "By our reckoning, this would reduce the total amount of the required official sector bailout funding during a three-year program period by about 6.6 billion euros," the paper says. Euro zone finance ministers reversed course and urged the Cypriot government on Monday to exempt small savers from a planned levy on deposits agreed at a meeting in Brussels in the early hours of Saturday. But the Cypriot parliament was still expected to reject the 10 billion euro bailout deal in a scheduled vote on Tuesday, which may be pushed back if failure looks inevitable. Cyprus risks default and a banking collapse if it is unable to find a way out of the impasse. That is why the Buchheit and Gulati proposal, a draft of which was published on the website of the Social Science Research Network on Monday, may be relevant. Buchheit has crafted or advised on debt restructurings for the past 30 years, including those in Uruguay, Greece and Iraq. The authors argue that the CDs would lock in funding for Cypriot banks for many years, while the bond extension would avoid the need for those maturities to be repaid out of official sector bailout funds. They concede that their solution could raise a number of objections - among them that Cypriot banks would still need to be recapitalised and that the banks themselves own most of the country's debt. European governments and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) might also object to a solution which may not address their concerns about debt sustainability in Cyprus. But the authors present their proposal as the least painful and risky of a limited number of unattractive options. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
