We are talking about Otkritie Bank and the Russian National Commercial Bank.
Andrey Kostin, President and Chairman of the Board of VTB, proposed to the head of the Russian government, Mikhail Mishustin, to merge the bank with two more state-controlled credit institutions. This information, citing sources, is provided by Kommersant.
According to the publication, Kostin considers it necessary to merge VTB with Otkritie Bank and the Russian National Commercial Bank. According to an unnamed source of the newspaper, this proposal has already received the approval of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In addition, the Central Bank of Russia supported the merger.
The Central Bank of Russia, the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation and all three banks refused to give official comments on Kostin’s proposal.
An unnamed Kommersant source in the Russian cabinet believes that pooling state financial assets on the basis of a strong player is “economically and politically justified.” In his opinion, such a decision would make it possible to spend budgetary funds more efficiently on stabilizing the banking sector and at the same time maintain a competitive market for financial services.
As Kommersant notes, if the three banks in question merge, the new structure will be inferior to Sberbank in terms of the number of assets and the number of branches. Their total assets amount to 22.9 trillion rubles, Sberbank – 38.3 trillion rubles. According to the Central Bank of Russia, the total number of branches of VTB, Otkritie and RNCB is about two thousand offices, while Sberbank has more than 13.2 thousand of them.
