ASTANA (Reuters) -Kazakhstan’s banking regulator plans to block Halyk Bank and other lenders that have received state support from paying dividends until they adjust profits to account for that help, it said on Wednesday.
Shareholders of Halyk, the Central Asian nation’s biggest bank, plan to vote on May 25 on the board’s proposal to pay out half of its 2022 profit of $1.2 billion in dividends.
Abylkassymova said Halyk, in particular, needed to adjust its profits to account for the support it received when it took over Kazkommertsbank in 2017. Kazkommertsbank had offloaded its bad assets to a special state fund before the merger.
She did not say how much exactly Halyk had received and it was unclear how much the authorities wanted it to pay back.
The bank’s London-listed global depository receipts fell as much as 4.5% on Wednesday before recovering losses to trade 0.2% down on the day at 1145 GMT. On the Kazakh Stock Exchange, the bank’s stock was down 3%.
Halyk Bank, which had no immediate comment on the matter, is controlled by Kazakh businessman Timur Kulibayev and his wife Dinara who is a daughter of former president Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Nazarbayev resigned in 2019, but had retained sweeping powers as the leader of the ruling party and the head of the security council until early 2022 when he and his successor Kassym-Jomart Tokayev fell out amid violent unrest.
(Reporting by Tamara VaalWriting by Olzhas Auyezov; Editing by Andrew Heavens, Elaine Hardcastle)
