Development Bank of Belarus seeks to expand international operations

         The Development Bank of Belarus is working hard to expand international operations worldwide, Chairman of the Board of the Development Bank of the Republic of Belarus Sergei Rumas said in a recent interview. “We have come up with a clear-cut strategy and tactics to promote this line of business; we hand-picked a team of experts able to fulfill this task within a short period of time,” Sergei Rumas said. At present the work is underway to create a corresponding banking network (with banks from Belarus, Russia, Western Europe and other countries and regions), sign cooperation agreements with development banks of foreign countries, and establish ties with foreign financial institutions in a bid to raise tied and non-tied loans as part of bilateral operations.
      “Potential partners and investors have already signaled their interest,” Sergei Rumas said. “The access to the international credit market is an important step for the Development Bank. While working on the first project we are trying to foresee all possible issues and technicalities that might frustrate our plans. Therefore, while choosing the instrument to implement our debut project we decided to stick to a simple principle: raising the cheapest resources for long periods. Using this principle we opted for a rather simple and affordable financial instrument – a syndicated loan,” Sergei Rumas said.