Bank Société Générale Vostok’s Yekaterinburg branch has been issuing increasingly fewer loans to businesses over the last two years. The total loan output, as far as large and medium enterprises are concerned, declined from 6.8bn RUR in 2008 down to 3.4bn RUR in 2010.

The bank explains its main efforts were focused on bad debts, while the actual loan issuance process only began in the second half of 2010, after the annual report for 2009 had been published.

‘Last year was mainly the one of debt amortization. We had to set our problem assets straight. Some of our borrowers are still giving us a hard time. For one, the situation around Pnevmostroymachine hasn’t got any better. So this was a year of hard work, we were busy purging our business lending portfolio from the old bad stuff,’ says the Director of the bank’s Ural Federal District Directorate Alexei Pavin at a press meeting in Yekaterinburg.