The holiday season in Sevastopol is under threat due to the paralysis of the banking system
Sevastopol, April 25 (Navigator, Egor Kagorov) – The holiday season in Sevastopol may be disrupted due to the fact that the banking system is not functioning.
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Vyacheslav Aksenov, adviser to the city governor on economics, stated this at the interbank forum.
He emphasized that Sevastopol was a fairly saturated city in terms of banking branches: more than 50 legal entities operated, of which only one bank (Morskoy) was Sevastopol, and the rest represented Kiev, Donetsk, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Odessa.
Vyacheslav Aksenov noted that today, out of 200 Ukrainian banking divisions that operated in the city, 12 banks remained.
“Branches of Russian banks are appearing, but extremely slowly. If there is no significant acceleration of the process, then, most likely, the season will be disrupted, since tourists are accustomed to using non-cash payments,” said the governor’s adviser.
The situation is aggravated by the fact that some Russian banks carry out transactions only in rubles, which causes certain difficulties for residents of Sevastopol and Crimea, since at the moment the population has significantly more hryvnia funds than ruble ones.
“I understand that this is not their whim and whim, but because there is a serious real problem not only of how to make payments with the hryvnia, since the hryvnia is a foreign currency for them, but also what to do with the cash hryvnia,” said the acting. O. Governor of Sevastopol.
In turn, the chairman of the board of Krayinvestbank OJSC Sergei Britvin, who took part in the forum, said that only a “willful decision” of the Central Bank could save the situation.
“What has not been fundamentally resolved today is the technology for working with cash hryvnia. And here only the decision of the Central Bank, only a political decision can move something forward. Because it is almost impossible to transform a cash hryvnia even into a non-cash one, I’m not talking about rubles. The National Bank of Ukraine is preventing this,” Britvin said.
Sevastopol's holiday season is under threat due to banking system paralysis.