BEIJING, Jan. 12 (Xinhua) -- Since the Belt and Road Initiative was brought up, domestic banks, especially the large state-owned banks, have been focusing on overseas financial strategy that helps serve the Belt and Road Initiative.
In an interview with Economic Information Daily, a senior manager from the Bank of China (BOC) revealed that by the end of November 2017, the BOC had followed up about 520 major projects under the Belt and Road Initiative, and had completed various credit support of some 98 billion U.S. dollars to the countries along the Belt and Road since 2015.
In January 2017, BOC Hungary branch and the preparatory group of Karachi branch jointly launched a three-year 300-million-U.S. dollar loan to Pakistan's Finance Ministry. Such credit will effectively promote the sound relations between the BOC and the Pakistani government, and will benefit the future expansion to China-Pakistan cooperation projects inside the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor framework, stated the senior manager.
Besides, on July 26, 2017, the BOC, as the co-lead underwriter and the leading bookrunner, assisted Hungary to successfully issue a three-year one-billion RMB bonds (known as panda bonds) in the Chinese interbank bond market. Being the first issuance of RMB bonds for Hungary to enter the Chinese interbank bond market, the bonds are the first sovereign panda debt under Bond Connect, and also the first fundraising that are explicitly used for the Belt and Road cooperation.
Furthermore, in pursuit of offering more stable, diversified and low cost fund support to the construction of the Belt and Road projects, the BOC has also innovatively adopted the way of multi-agency, multi-currency and multi-variety to issue Belt and Road theme bonds various times. These bonds, covering multiple currencies and lengths of maturity, are issued mainly by BOC’s different branches along the Belt and Road. Up till now, the BOC has totally launched three issuances of the Belt and Road theme bonds of 7.6 billion U.S. dollars. (Edited by Niu Huizhe, niuhuizhe,xinhua.org)
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