Kazakhstan was one of the worst-hit victims of the 2008 credit crisis, with two of the country’s largest banks, BTA and Alliance, defaulting on their substantial debts in 2009. However, the past year has given plenty of cause to believe that the central Asian country’s reputation, among bond investors at least, has been impressively rehabilitated.
The Development Bank of Kazakhstan (DBK) and the Almaty-headquartered multilateral Eurasian Development Bank (EDB), in which the Russian and Kazakh governments are the largest shareholders, have been at the cutting edge of this revival. DBK took Kazakh international issuance into new territory with the first sukuk (sharia-compliant notes) from any country in the former Soviet Union in June 2012, denominated in Malaysian ringgit to target the largest single pool of Islamic finance investors.
