BRICS Bank President meets Indian PM ahead of taking charge
May 28, 2015, 1:25 pm

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (right) with the first BRICS Bank president K.V. Kamath in New Delhi on 28 May 2015 [Image: Twitter/PMO]

The official Twitter handle of the Indian Prime Minister’s Office on Thursday posted a picture of Modi’s meet with Kundapur Vaman Kamath.

Earlier this month, the Indian government announced the appointment of Indian banker Kamath as president of the $100 billion New Development Bank being set up by the BRICS.

Kamath, who has earlier worked with the Asian Development Bank and was the FORBES ASIA’s 2007 Businessman of the Year, will leave for Shanghai next week. The Bank will have its headquarters in the Chinese city.

Russia’s Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told reporters after the Summit in Brazil that the BRICS decided in favor of Shanghai because the city offers better infrastructure, opportunities to capture private funding, and is home to more investors than the competitors.

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov will become the bank’s first Chairman of the Board of Governors, while the first chairperson of the Board of Directors will be Brazilian. South Africa will establish an African regional center for the bank.

The bank is likely to be operationalised within one year.

South African Trade and Industry Rob Davies said last year that although the capital of the New Development Bank and the Contingency Reserve Arrangement had been set at $100 billion each, this did not mean that this capital would necessarily be held in US dollars.

“We want to move away from the same old, same old way of doing things. What currencies the capital will be held in is something that will be part of the Sherpa process with the pace set by Brazil, but we expect substantive progress by the time of the next BRICS summit in Russia in June 2015,” he said.

The BRICS combined GDP grew 300 per cent in the last decade as opposed to 60 per cent growth registered by the developed world.

The launch of the bank and the $100 billion currency reserve pool in July is their first concrete step toward reshaping the Western-dominated international financial system.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday stressed that BRICS cooperation has moved beyond economics and that security issues are an important part of the group’s agenda.

Putin met the top security officials from the five BRICS countries in Moscow on Tuesday, stating that the meeting was an “important stage of preparation for the BRICS summit in Ufa in July 2015?.

TBP