Foreign companies in Kazakhstan may have to carry out currency operations in tenge
By Kamila Aliyeva
Foreign companies may be obliged to carry out currency operations in tenge on the territory of Kazakhstan.
This was stated by Oleg Smolyakov, Deputy Chairman of the Kazakh National Bank, Kazinform reported.
Under the current legislation, branches of foreign companies have the status of non-residents. Respectively, they freely carry out all settlements in foreign currency on the territory of Kazakhstan, according to the official.
“We have always talked about dedollarization, the expansion of the use of the national currency, so we change the status for them. Now, under the new bill, which we hope will be adopted in case of support by the MPs, branches of foreign companies with a number of exceptions will have the status of residents and will have to carry out operations in national currency on the Kazakh territory,” he said before the presentation of the government project “On Currency Regulation and Currency Control” in the Majilis (Parliament).
At the same time, the deputy chairman added that the liberal currency regime will be preserved for foreign companies in terms of registration, notification, opening of accounts abroad, relationships between branches, as well as relationships between branches and parent companies.
“This applies mostly to legal entities, nothing changes for the population. Purchase, sale of foreign currency [will be carried out] without restrictions; free of charge transfers - without restrictions. Even if there are any big transfers abroad, banks will notify about these transfers, that is, individuals will not come to us,” he explained.
It is also planned to allow Kazakh exchange offices to sell the gold bars of the National Bank.
“We are expanding the scope of sale gold bars. We have a project, now it is implemented only through banks. We want to grant this right to authorized financial organizations, that is, exchange offices, so that they can sell them to individuals as well,” Smolyakov said.
At the same time, he assured that this would not affect the rate of tenge.
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Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva
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