UrBC, Moscow, February 22, 2019. The Central Bank of Russia intends to limit Russians’ access to forex trading and to only allow qualified investors enter the forex market, the bank’s Vice Chair Vladimir Chistyukhin told TASS.

‘Allowing forex dealers to operate legally would be a very big step. The Central Bank has opposed the respective draft bill for a long time, but the legislative authorities made their decision as they saw fit. However, the proposed legal mechanisms are obviously insufficient to ensure protection for private players. We are about to compete our draft bill on qualified and unqualified investors, since we firmly believe the forex market should only be accessible to the qualified ones. Moreover, we will even bring the leverage level from 1:50 down to 1:30 for them,’ Chistyukhin is quoted as saying.

According to Chistyukhin, forex services are a bit like financial pyramid schemes, even though the former do get regulated by a set of legal restrictions.

‘We identified 223 illegal forex dealers’ websites in 2018 and 352 websites in the last two years. The Central Bank looks into the information it gets through customer complaints, news on the media, and data reported by other market players. We cannot map the entire unlawful activity landscape, however; this is a grey area that is nearly impossible to investigate closely,’ Chistyukhin said.