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Rossisky resurrection

Rossisky Kredit Bank nearly went under in Russia’s 1998 financial crisis. Ben Aris reports from Moscow on how it weathered the storm and its miraculous comeback as an investment bank.Rossisky Kredit Bank (RKB) is back from the dead. One of the dozen banks that were household names in the 1990s, but collapsed during the 1998 financial crisis, RKB is the only big Russian bank to have paid off all its debts and returned to profit. RKB’s recovery is a damning condemnation of its peers, which walked away from billions of dollars in debt and left hundreds of thousands of pensioners destitute after they lost their life savings.
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RKB’s owner, Boris Ivanishvili, is the only pre-crisis oligarch to make a sincere attempt to pay off his debts.

The bank’s recovery is particularly galling to its peers because it was among those hardest hit by the collapse of the banking system. Within weeks of the crash, it was due to pay back a one-year $125m syndicated loan and make a $10.2m coupon payment on a two-year $200m Eurobond. A government moratorium on international payments meant that it defaulted on both.

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