The Finance Minister: the state of Azerbaijan wants to borrow your dollars and offers interests in return”
“The government and the Central Bank is taking steps to stop the stir in the currency market and restore the respect to Azeri manat,” told Minister of Finance Samir Sharifov in his interview to “Hesabat” program on ANS TV.
He said that securities will be presented to the market in a few days: “These are manat securities. We will be paying high interests on these securities. I invite citizens to invest manats they keen under the mattress in these securities. We will be paying high interests. These interests will be a bit higher than the inflation. If the inflation is 10 per cent, we will be offering 11 – 12 per cent.”
Samir Sharifov told that the Ministry of Finance is also planning to offer foreign currency securities for sale. These securities will be for the internal market.
He said that currently there is a large amount of foreign currency in the country: “This foreign currency does not work, and doesn’t bring its owners any profit. We now need to make this foreign currency work.
But we will not offer a very high interest for the foreign currency. We teh Azeri government tell that you give your dollars to us. We are not going to give you high interests. We just want the money to work. We will offer lower interests for the foreign currency securities. I believe it will be about 3 per cent. Why? Because we do not want the foreign currency deposits in the bank to flow away. We can give low interests.
Then the population will choose what to do.
The population may choose to keep its foreign currency at home without working, which is a risk. It is a risk to keep a large amount of money at home as it may be stolen or there may be a fire… This is why they need to think about why they have joined this panic. There is no need to exchange the last banknote in the pocket to the foreign currency”.
