| The chance of the deposit insurance law passing this year
slipped again as representatives from the Federation Council suggested
they would block the bill and bankers said deputies acted on purely pre-election
motives.
The State Duma passed an amended version of the bill in a second reading
Wednesday.
The deputies voted to retain state guarantees on all Sberbank deposits
until 2007, not just on those accounts opened before the law comes into
effect, as stipulated in an earlier version backed by the government and
the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament.
The Duma version "gives Sberbank clear advantages vis-È-vis
other financial institutions for attracting people's savings," which
is anti-competitive and contradicts the Russian Constitution, deputy chairman
of the Federation Council's financial committee Igor Provkin said in an
e-mail to The Moscow Times.
Provkin said the bill, if approved in a third Duma reading, "will
have a hard time passing the Federation Council, since the members of
the council are not affected by pre-election populism. At the very least,
the [finance] committee will recommend that it be sent back."
His views were echoed by other committee officials Thursday, as well
as by some bankers.
The deputies "destroyed the compromise that was so difficult to
hammer out," said Yevgeny Ivanov, president of Rosbank, one of the
participants in months-long negotiations on the bill. "Such a version
of the law should be rejected now and reviewed next year."
Deputies defended the vote.
"We must not, with our own hands, worsen the situation for millions
of Sberbank account holders," Yabloko deputy Mikhail
Zadornov said on Wednesday in the Duma .
The bill gives the Central Bank the right to conduct special inspections
to allow or reject banks from entering the insurance scheme.
Most analysts said this was the most important part of the bill, as
it would allow for greater regulation of the country's fragmented banking
sector and help depositors choose between healthy and weak banks.
Some bankers, however, insisted the inspections would take too long.
"We have serious doubts that the Central Bank could conduct these
inspections quickly and professionally," said Andrei Yemelin, executive
vice president of the Association of Russian Banks, adding that current
regulations are already too extensive.
Nevertheless, Yemelin called for passage of the bill: "It would
be easier to correct it later than to start anew," he said.
"If I could be sure this law would be adopted within the next six
months, I'd wait [for a more liberal version]," said Andrei Ivanov,
bank analyst at Troika Dialogue. As it is, he supports the bill's adoption
now.
But Natalya Orlova, an analyst at Alfa Bank, said that the bill is unsatisfactory
to too many sides and may fail at some future legislative stage.
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