The largest bank in Russia, state-run Sberbank, has registered a subsidiary for international commodity financing and trading in the Swiss canton of Zug, the company said on Tuesday, according to Reuters.
Sber Trading Swiss AG plans to open the office and to begin trading in the first half of 2020, Sberbank said.
“The creation of STS in the European jurisdiction will help us to enter new markets, and increase the scale and diversification of our commodity operations,” said the deputy chairman of Sberbank’s board, Anatoly Popov.
“The company will specialize in the implementation of prepayments and postpayments, as well as the monetization of inventories and physical transactions with commodities,” he added.
According to the Swiss Trade Register, Sber Trading Swiss, with a registered capital of 30 million Swiss francs ($30.5 million), will engage in international trade in goods, including oil, metals, agricultural products, their storage, transportation and marketing. The chairman of the board of directors is Alexander Zozulya. Now Zozulya is the head of the department of trading operations in the currency market at Sberbank.
In 2013, Sberbank launched a business for financing the export of raw materials, focused on transactions with Russian exporters, on the basis of its Swiss subsidiary Sberbank (Switzerland) AG.
According to the lender’s annual reports, in 2016 Sberbank (Switzerland) AG allocated more than $2 billion for transactions in the field of trade finance.
