According to "Vedomosti", it was quite a surprise to many market players. A bank can receive a rating higher than the sovereign one only if a major share of its assets and income falls on a country with a higher rating, or if a substantial part of its liabilities is guaranteed by foreign organizations, according to Irina Penkina, an analyst at Standard & Poor's Agency. Nothing like this exists in Russia, and it's a rare phenomenon in the rest of the world. James Watson from Fitch Ratings reminds that a rule of a "national ceiling" (which is usually equivalent to the sovereign rating) is applied to unsecured liabilities in the countries rated lower than the investment level.
So far only one bond flotation by "Gazprom" received a rating higher that the sovereign one. The investment rating BBB- (in contrast to the sovereign BB+) granted by S&P and Fitch enabled the company to borrow $ 1.25 bn at a record low interest rate of 7.2 per cent in summer. These liabilities, however, were secured by "Gazprom" export contracts, so a high estimate was not surprising for experts.
Moody's takes "a special view on the banks with state participation": in the agency's opinion, even in case of a default on sovereign bonds Russian authorities will help the two "backbone" banks to pay their Western lenders, the agency's analyst Dmitrii Polyakov explains. According to him, Moody's research showed that there were very few cases in the world when major state-owned banks attracting private deposits had defaulted on their hard-currency liabilities. Polyakov reminded that during the 1998 default the Russian Central Bank had kept VTB and Sberbank "afloat" using loans and other mechanisms.
