VIENNA: Raiffeisen Bank International's business in Russia is doing well despite the weak local economy and political tensions over Ukraine, the Austrian bank's chairman told Kurier newspaper.
"We can't complain at all about the Russian bank," Walter Rothensteiner was quoted as saying in an interview published on Saturday, calling it "probably the best bank in Russia with a first-class group of customers".
The crisis in Ukraine, where the bank's local business is losing money, was "unpleasant but we can't do anything about it", he said.
Hungary was slowly picking up and other markets were not doing badly, including low-margin Austria, he said. RBI, emerging Europe's second-biggest lender, has launched a major revamp to shrink its balance sheet and boost its core capital ratio to 12 percent of risk-weighted assets in 2017.
It is scaling back in Russia, its single most lucrative market.
Rothensteiner said it aimed to grow in Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
He played down the potential impact of Swiss franc mortgage loans in the region that suddenly became more expensive to service when the franc soared this year.
"This is in part a Polish topic, but there we have first-class clients and hardly any defaults. These are very reliable customers who are not costing anyone any sleep."
RBI lost money for the first time in 2014 and it has said it may have another loss this year after restructuring charges.
Asked if it might yet make a 2015 profit, he said: "People always forget that the other 13 of the 15 banking units are running without complaints, and they are still doing so."
He reiterated there were no plans to merge the regional banks that own a majority of RBI's unlisted parent, Raiffeisen Zentralbank, but that the group had to cut costs in back-office operations like compliance and legal.
He did not specify how many jobs might go, saying only there would be no mass layoffs.
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