‘We’ll officially declare what our intentions towards Bank Severnaya Kazna are as soon as the situation becomes more or less clear,’ Sistema Financial Corporation’s press secretary Yulia Belous said to an UrBC reporter.

UrBC reported on November 12, 2008 that the Moscow Bank for Reconstruction and Development (owned by Sistema) might possibly acquire the bank’s majority shareholding. Bank Severnaya Kazna’s BOD Chairman Vladimir Frolov might have chosen this bank to offer it his own 22.5% shareholding, with a number of minority shareholders following suit. As a result, the Moscow Bank for Reconstruction and Development would get control over the bank.

Bank Severnaya Kazna was unable to provide any comments to this extent.

Bank Severnaya Kazna kept experiencing liquidity problems over the last two months, as the customers withdrew as many as 900 million RUR from their deposits in September 2008 alone. Things went from bad to worse in October, so the bank had to impose some limits on cashing the private customers’ deposits in before the end of the deposit period. Vladimir Frolov admits the liquidity shortage comes to about eight billion RUR.