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Russia says IMF inadequate

Financial Law     updated  2008/11/10 10:01


Russia's finance minister reiterated Moscow's call for reforming global financial institutions, saying in comments televised Monday that the International Monetary Fund was inadequate as a crisis manager.

Alexei Kudrin spoke ahead of a meeting of top international financial ministers Saturday in Washington to discuss the deepening global crisis.

Russia has proposed creating new international agencies to replace or take on some of the functions of existing ones, like the IMF or the World Bank. Moscow has said those organizations do not adequately represent some of the larger economies such as China and Russia.

"We are absolutely sure that today the current system of institutions used for crisis settlement, including the IMF, are inadequate," said Kudrin in comments on the state-funded English language network Russia Today.

Kudrin called for a new agreement along the lines of the Maastricht Treaty, the 1992 treaty that paved the way for the euro, that would obligate nations to meet a certain set of budget and economic criteria in order to prevent new crises.

Russia has been hard hit by the global crisis, with economic growth forecasts slashed and its stock markets losing some two-thirds of their value since the start of the year.

The Kremlin has laid the bulk of the blame with the United States.

On Friday, a top Kremlin aide suggested the IMF's role be reduced to that of an ordinary financial institution.

"The IMF should work as a bank, not as a project finance institution. It should not act as a manager in countries it lends to," Arkady Dvorkovich told a news conference. "It should put forward financial conditions on loans, not political ones."


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