Major banks on recent crisis

Yesterday, Russia's major banks - Sberbank, Vneshtorgbank (VTB), and Alfa Bank - summed up the July crisis in the banking sector. VTB President Andrei Kostin and Chairman of the Alfa-Bank Board Mikhail Fridman all spoke at a press conference, VN writes today.

The banks emerged from the mini-crisis with different results: Alfa lost $240 million in private deposits, while state-run Sberbank, on the contrary, enjoyed an inflow of private money and attracted over 10 billion roubles from private individuals within a week. In the same period, Vneshtorgbank managed to purchase 85.68% of Guta-Bank shares for merely a million rubles and has already appointed a new chairman, former VTB vice president Mikhail Kuzovlev.

Bankers believe that the July crisis was due to several reasons, the main one being "the underdevelopment of the Russian banking system" and a crisis of the state's trust in towards private business.