Currency restrictions to be lifted in mid 2016 – NBU head
The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) will lift all currency restrictions introduced in September 2014 and February 2015 by mid 2016, NBU Governor Valeriya Gontareva has said. "We have started a step-by-step liberalization of all our administrative restrictions. Moreover, our task for today is not just to remove all administrative restrictions, which were introduced in September 2014 and in February 2015, but we want to drop these restrictions and go into a completely other life, a life without the decree on currency regulations dated 1993. It became obsolete in 1998. We have already launched liberalization and step-by-step cancellation of the restrictions, but a full cancelation will be done, it seems to me, to the middle of next year," she said in a video address to the participants of Odesa Financial Forum on Thursday. Gontareva said that the NBU had introduced administrative restrictions as other state institutions did were not working including the tax, customs, financial monitoring, justice system, prosecutor's agencies, and financial services market and securities market regulators. "Definitely, liberalization of the market, which is waiting for us, foresees that other institutions of power will start to work well, and we believe in that, we will help to implement our reforms," she said.