Shanghai — The New Development Bank (NDB), set up by the Brics group of major emerging economies, wants loans to the private sector to eventually take up a 30% share of its project portfolio, a senior executive at the bank said on Tuesday.
Zhu Xian, the NDB’s chief operating officer, says the bank is targeting an overall 70%-30% split between sovereign and nonsovereign loans in its project portfolio.
He says the bank has seen strong demand for private-sector loans especially in Brazil, SA and Russia.
The Shanghai-based bank on Monday approved six new projects, which brought its loan portfolio to more than $5.1bn across 21 projects.
Two of these were nonsovereign loans, which are issued to companies without a government guarantee.
"In India and China, there’s very strong demand for sovereign.… But on the other hand, some other countries for different reasons they probably prefer more nonsovereign lending," he says.
"Some countries still have some sort of fiscal difficulties. Secondly, the debt sustainability is a concern. They don’t want to borrow too much in sovereign terms. So they prefer you do more market transactions."
The bank’s first nonsovereign project was a $200m loan to Brazil’s Petrobras for an environmental protection scheme and the second a $200m loan to Transnet to reconstruct a port in Durban.
Zhu says there was a gap in the market for the bank to fill as it was willing to make long-term loans with tenures of at least 10 years.
The NDB is seen as the first major achievement of the Brics grouping — Brazil, Russia, India, China and SA — since they joined forces in 2009 to press for a bigger say in the global financial order created by Western powers after the Second World War.
Reuters
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