BRICS New Development Bank to hold capital for financing projects in Q1 2016

SHANGHAI, December 10. /TASS/. The New Development Bank (NDB, BRICS Bank) will hold capital for financing projects in the first quarter of 2016, its first ever president Kundapur Vaman Kamath told TASS on Thursday. "By January 3, we should have our shared capital in. And then we plan to raise some amount of debt. So quickly after we should come with the debt issue and that’s very-very fast. So in the first quarter we should have some capital in and a little bit of debt," he said. When asked whether the bank will manage to provide first lending by April 2016 as was previously announced, Kamath said: "That is on schedule." "That would mean that we already started the dialog with the governments of various countries. We have the project pipeline going, started looking at those that we will choose for April," he added. President also said many organizational issues have already been resolved despite the fact that the institution is only 5-months-old. "The broad organization structure that will be in place to run this organization has come into place only at the recent board meeting that we had last month. The key elements of this structure are the functional duties of the four vice-presidents, below whom the teams will start getting down in the next six months," he said, adding that "the staffing will happen in next six months." "We will work in parallel. Set up the structure, get policy done. We’re now working in parallel to get organization teams built up and to start raising projects. So we will work in parallel rather than say - we will wait until everything will be in place, after that we will start," president said. "In next three years or so we need to get substantial part of our capital in, to start borrowing on a regular basis and to start lending on regular basis. Then you can say we are on schedule. Three years of working in parallel," he said. The Shanghai-headquartered BRICS New Development Bank has been established to finance infrastructure projects and projects for sustainable development of BRICS and other developing countries. The agreement on setting up the financial institution was reached on July 15, 2014 in Brazil’s Fortaleza. The bank will have a starting capital of $10 bln. BRICS is an informal association of five major emerging national economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The group was founded in June 2006 at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum and was known as BRIC prior to inclusion of South Africa in 2009. Russia is presiding in BRICS in 2015 and is chairing the BRICS Business Council until April 2016. Read more