Sberbank CIB, the investment arm of Russia’s biggest lender Sberbank, has pledged to open several five-year credit lines to a total of $2.2bn for oligarch Vladimir Potanin’s Interros multi-industrial investment conglomerate.

The money will be used to refinance part of Interros’s current loan portfolio and fund some of the projects of the Moscow-headquartered company, which mainly does business in mining, metals, the entertainment industry, real estate, tourism, transport and logistics, Sberbank CIB said in a statement.

Some of the credit lines are dollar- and others ruble-denominated, but money from the ruble lines may be provided in foreign currency under the terms of the deal.

“In recent years, Interros has systematically worked on lowering its general debt level and optimizing its loan portfolio,” the statement quoted Interros first deputy chief executive as saying.

“These lines of credit which were put together with our colleagues from Sberbank CIB will help reduce the burden on our investment projects and significantly reduce the cost of servicing our debt, in part by allowing us to repay our more expensive loans.”

“The Sberbank team has been collaborating with Interros for a long time,” said Alexander Bazarov, a co-chief executive of Sberbank CIB and senior vice-president of parent company Sberbank.

“The company’s business is developing in a stable fashion and consequently has new needs to be met. We, as a flexible universal bank, are always prepared to meet any – even the most unusual – client request. It’s important to note that the Sberbank CIB team worked on structuring the deal,” he said.

Russia’s BrokerCreditService (BCS) has taken the number one spot by derivatives trading volumes at Moscow Exchange for May, pushing rival Moscow broker Otkritie down to second place.

BCS, which set up an office in London from scratch less than a year ago, posted a turnover of 1.82trln rubles ($57bn) in the bourse’s Futures and Options (FORTS) unit for last month, according to Moscow Exchange statistics.

BankersAccuity, a company setting global standards for payment efficiency and offering compliance solutions, is launching the first politically exposed person (PEP) database for the Russian market in a bid to prevent fraud, money laundering and bribery.

The database contains data on individuals who are part of the executive, legislative or judicial branches of government, military leaders, directors of state-owned entities and executives appointed by the Russian president.

It also has records on immediate family and known close associates of such people, according to a statement from the London-based company, which is owned by the Reed Business Information business to business publisher and part of global business information provider Reed Elsevier.

One new feature of the database is that it contains information in Cyrillic as well as Latin characters.

BankersAccuity’s director for risk and payments, Micah Willbrand, told EmergingMarkets.me that all previous databases only used Latin characters, which meant many of Russia’s PEP names remained unknown to foreign banks and corporates.

Sberbank, Russia’s biggest lender, has announced two senior hires for the fixed income, currencies and commodities (FICC) division of its investment arm, Sberbank CIB.

Francois Mantion has joined from J.P. Morgan as head of commodity trading and Raymond Bird came over from Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) to take charge of strategic equity financing in global markets trading.

Both are based in Moscow, according to a statement from Sberbank.

Mantion has spent over 15 years working in international commodity markets in London and New York. He joined J.P. Morgan in 1996 and went through a series of jobs there before he left the bank this winter.

Bird joined RBS in 2004, holding roles overseeing the equity financing portfolio, basket execution, and algorithmic execution strategies.

Before being hired by the British firm, he worked for UBS, first as an equity researcher and then as a trading project specialist in Chicago, New York and Zurich before settling in London as executive director for European equity trading in 2001.

The four year appointment was confirmed at NLB’s annual general meeting of shareholders.

NLB Group is the largest Slovenian international financial group. It consists of 11 banks, seven leasing companies, nine companies for international trade financing (factoring, forfeiting, export financing), three insurance companies, an asset management division and 17 other subsidiaries.

Miha Košak covers the CEE region within Global Banking at VTB Capital and throughout his career has been involved in privatization, advisory, ECM and DCM transactions valued at over USD50bn.

CBRE Global Investors named Michael Ness as head of UK, a role which he will combine with his current responsibilities as managing director and head of separate accounts.

SOGESMAINT-CBRE was established in 1973 and today it is one of the leading property and asset management businesses in Belgium. The company manages over 1.4 million square meters across 90 properties throughout the country and also provides project management and leasing services.

The company’s professional team will become part of CBRE’s EMEA Property and Asset Management practice, which manages over 35 million square meters of assets across the region with a focus on premier properties, shopping centres and major portfolios. In response to growing client demand, CBRE has significantly strengthened this capability in the region, underlined by its recent acquisitions of IMPACT-CORTI and Euro Mall Center Management, two property management firms operating in Central Europe, and SCM, a shopping centre specialist in the Netherlands.

CBRE Global Investors named Michael Ness as head of UK, a role which he will combine with his current responsibilities as managing director and head of separate accounts.

Its latest project in this sector, in the largest western Ukrainian municipality of Lviv, will consist of an EBRD loan of up to €20 million, supplemented  by grant funding of up to €10 million from the Eastern Europe Energy Efficiency and Environment Partnership (E5P). The financing package will be provided to the communal enterprise Lvivteploenergo, which will use the proceeds to modernise and rehabilitate the existing district heating infrastructure in the city.

The loan will finance the introduction of individual heating substations, the rehabilitation and modernisation of heat distribution networks, the installation of natural gas fired mini-combined heat and power plants, the replacement of obsolete main transmission pipelines and the installation of necessary monitoring systems. It is expected that upon completion of the project almost half of Lviv’s population of 760 thousand people will benefit from better quality and environmentally friendly heat and hot water services.

The €10 million grant will be the largest grant to date provided by the E5P to a Ukrainian municipality. The E5P* fund was established by international donors to co-finance investments in the Ukrainian municipal sector and the EU Eastern Partnership countries with a focus on demand-side efficiency improvements.

By implementing this project the municipality of Lviv will reduce the consumption of natural gas by 6.9 million cubic metres, electricity by 2,900 MWh and water by 15,900 cubic metres per year.  CO₂ emissions will also be reduced by almost 80 thousand tonnes per year through more efficient utilisation of fuel.

The important technical assistance necessary for the project preparation and implementation was provided by the government of Sweden.

The EBRD is the largest financial investor in Ukraine. As of 31 March 2013 the Bank had committed over €8.63 billion (US$ 11 billion) through 337 projects in the country.

*The Eastern Europe Energy Efficiency and Environment Partnership – E5P is a Euro 90 million multi-donor fund managed by the EBRD designed to promote energy efficiency investments in Ukraine and other eastern European countries and was set up under the initiative of the Swedish government during its presidency of the European Union in 2009.The fund will complement energy efficiency loans provided by financial institutions including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the European Investment Bank, the Nordic Investment Bank, the Nordic Environment Finance Corporation and the World Bank Group. Contributors to E5P are European Union, Sweden, Ukraine, USAID, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Poland, Estonia, Iceland, Lithuania and Latvia.

Baring Asset Management, Inc. appointed Isabelle Alexander as investment manager, assisting with the management of the GEMs portfolios. Alexander has seven years investment experience and was previously a portfolio manager at Pictet Asset Management in its Global Emerging Markets Team.