MOSCOW: Russia's central bank is ready to keep buying gold from banks but has no quotas or objective to increase gold's share in its reserves, the bank's First Deputy Governor Dmitry Tulin said on Wednesday.
"We are not currently selling foreign currency from reserves but keep buying gold for which prices are rising, which has led to a rise of gold's share in reserves," Tulin told reporters.
"We don't have an operational target of increasing gold's share in reserves but it may grow naturally," he said, adding the bank had made an offer to banks to buy gold.
An official with the Central Bank statistics department said separately on Wednesday that the bank will buy about 200 tonnes of gold this year to replenish its gold reserves, after buying 206.4 tonnes in 2015.
Gold accounts for around 16 percent of Russia's gold and foreign exchange reserves, Anton Navoi, deputy head of the statistics department with the central bank, told a conference.
"The bank keeps on buying gold because it is profitable," Navoi said. "We are a country that is third in the world in terms of gold production and we have the opportunity to buy it using our national currency."
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