National Bank Canceled Target Currency Purchase

The decision of December 28, 2017 will come into force in three months.

The National Bank cancels restrictions on the target purchase of foreign currency by legal entities and individual entrepreneurs, the regulator’s press release informs.

The corresponding norm is fixed in the resolution of the National Bank Board No. 538 of December 28, 2017, which comes into force three months after its official publication.

The resolution approves a new version of the Instruction on the procedure for performing currency exchange operations, which provides for establishing a uniform procedure for performing currency exchange transactions conducted by legal entities and individual entrepreneurs in the domestic foreign exchange market.

In particular, legal entities-residents will be able to buy currency as needed, determined by them independently. The period of use of the purchased foreign currency is also not established.

A similar procedure for performing currency exchange operations is also applied to individual entrepreneurs.

In accordance with the new Instruction, when buying foreign currency, legal entities and individual entrepreneurs will have to indicate the code of uses of the purchased foreign currency. In this case, the indication of these codes will be exclusively statistical in nature and will not limit the use of the acquired currency in other areas.

As previously reported, the target purchase of foreign currency, that is, the ability of enterprises and individual entrepreneurs to buy currency only for certain purposes (for settlements with non-residents, etc.), has been operating in Belarus since the 1990s. After the cancellation of the target purchase, enterprises and individual entrepreneurs will be able to buy foreign currency in unlimited volume and dispose of it at their own discretion.