The OJSC International Bank of Azerbaijan (IBA) was transferred to the management of the Azerbaijan Investment Holding (AIH). The corresponding decree was signed by President Ilham Aliyev.

Along with the IBA, the OJSC Azer-Turk Bank and the State Insurance Commercial Company “Azersigorta” were transferred to the management of the AIH.

Will this decision create conditions for the revival of the IBA, which has been involved in corruption scandals for years and has repeatedly received funds from the state budget for its rehabilitation, which turned out to be ineffectual? Will investors be suitable for cooperation with the bank, whose name is mentioned in corruption scandals? Will AIH help optimize Azer-Turk Bank and “Azersigorta” OJSC?

Economist Gubad Ibadoglu answered these and other questions in the “Difficult Question” program.

According to him, the transfer of the IBA to the management of the AIH means another attempt to privatize it, since, this process goes through the management of the AIH. Probably, one should expect that after that the IBA will be put up for privatization.

“Such attempts have been made more than once. For the first time such an attempt took place in 1998 within the framework of the “Big Privatization”. However, the IBA was never put up for privatization.

Subsequently, the mission of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has repeatedly raised the issue of the privatization of the IBA. Finally, in 2009 the decree on the privatization of the IBA was again signed. But even then, the bank was not privatized. Then it turned out that in 2009-2014, when Jahangir Hajiyev was chairman of the IBA, funds in the amount of 6 billion manats disappeared from the bank (Hajiyev and his lawyers rejected all charges of a crime and indicated that all bank loans were provided with the permission of the Central Bank and Ministry of Finance – ed.).

In 2015, the President re-signed the Decree on the privatization of the bank. But this time the bank was not privatized either. In 2018, another Privatization Decree was signed.

Then the bank failed to be privatized. It seems that the bank is bewitched and some mystical forces oppose its privatization,” Ibadoglu said.

The expert is sure that if the bank had been privatized in 1998, then 6 billion manats from the bank would not have gone anywhere.

“However, 6 billion manats is not a needle in a haystack and could not disappear overnight. The theft was stretched out in time and lasted for years. Obviously, the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank could not have been unaware of this, since it is the responsibility of these bodies to control cash flows, ”the economist said.

Ibadoglu is skeptical about the success of yet another attempt to privatize the IBA.

“Many state-owned enterprises have been transferred to the management of the AIH. Obviously, the privatization of enterprises, especially large ones, is not easy. And when there are many such enterprises and they are completely different in profile, have different specifics that must be taken into account, then the matter is complicated many times over. By the way, so far there has not been a single report on the activities of the AIH, so that one can judge its success,” he says

Source: Turan News Agency