Cbank buys 88 bln rbl foreign currency for fin ministry in February

MOSCOW, Mar 2 (PRIME) -- Russia’s central bank bought 88.3 billion rubles worth of foreign currency from the market on behalf of the Finance Ministry in February, as seen by PRIME in materials of the regulator on Thursday.

On Wednesday, the materials of the regulator showed it bought only 82 billion rubles worth of foreign currency. But the authority uses the USDRUB_TOM instrument of the Moscow Exchange for these operations, this is why the full volume of purchases in February was disclosed only on Thursday, when the regulator published Wednesday’s data reflecting Tuesday’s purchases.

On Tuesday, the central bank bought 6.3 billion rubles worth of foreign currency with tomorrow settlement on behalf of the ministry.

In January, the ministry said it planned to enter the currency market to minimize dependence of the ruble rate on oil prices. The ministry wanted to spend 6.3 billion rubles a day to buy foreign currency from February 7 through March 6, using the forecasted 113.1 billion rubles of additional oil and gas revenues of the budget for February.

The central bank said that the real volume of operations may differ from the planned amount due to differences in exchange rates and to rounding up or down.

(58.3776 rubles – U.S. $1)

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