MOSCOW: Russian banks revenues rose 9.4 percent to $326 billion (18.55 trillion rubles) in 2014 due to ruble’s plummet against dollar and euro.
Russians took 1.3 trillion rubles ($22.8 billion) out of the country’s banks last year, adding to the woes of a banking sector already hit by Western sanctions, a currency crisis and a deepening economic recession.
The real figures are even worse, Vedomosti added. When capitalized interest is removed from the tally, the fall in the value of deposits in Russian banks could be up to 7.6 percent.
The outflow comes as Russian banks turn to state support to cope with rising numbers of bad loans amid a sharp recession and sanctions over Moscow’s actions in Ukraine that have curbed access to Western funds.
“Even an outflow of 1.5 percent of deposits is a catastrophe, considering the conditions in which it happened,” Yevgeny Nadorshin, chief economist at Russian conglomerate Sistema, told Vedomosti.
“Foreign markets are closed, and retail deposits are a strategically important resource for banks,” he said.
