YEREVAN, May 15. /ARKA/. Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia voted for Russia during a voting of shareholders of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Russian RBC reported.
On May 10, EBRD shareholders overwhelmingly rejected Russia’s claim that the bank’s ban on Russian investments had breached EBRD rules.
EBRD President Suma Chakrabarti was quoted by news agencies as saying that the decision was “final and binding” and that there had been no discussion at the meeting about what it would require for it to restart investments in Russia.
Russian economic development minister Maxim Oreshkin described the decision as ‘an ethnicity-based discrimination’ adding that the rejection of Moscow’s challenge “created an extremely dangerous precedent…in fact a new norm, by which an international financial institution can curtail member rights”. He added: “We see that the EBRD has become a tool of [western] foreign policy and not a development institution.”
According to Russian RIA Novosti, a large number of countries abstained from voting, including Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, while Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia supported the position of the Russian Federation.
In 2014, the EBRD, which is dominated by shareholders from Europe and North America, refused new projects in Russia because of Western sanctions against Moscow.
The EBRD was founded in 1991 to finance the transition of former communist Europe to market democracy. Russia was for a long time its biggest lending destination. -0-
