Recently ranked in a nationwide poll as one of the most trusted and admired public Figures in the country, the chairman of the National Bank of Kazakhstan, Grigory Marchenko, has established himself as what the multilaterals could only dream of in a central bank governor.
Marchenko has risen through the ranks of government and private business in Kazakhstan, eventually heading up the office of DB Securities, the Deutsche Bank representative in the country. Because of his role as president of the local Deutsche Bank operation, his perfect German and German-accented Fluent English, visitors to his old DB office often assumed he was German. After hearing his Russian language skills, the next guess would be that he is a native of Kiev, given his Ukrainian-sounding surname. The announcement over a year ago that he would be taking up the post of National Bank chairman was the First time many in the emerging-market banking community learnt that he is actually a Kazakh national by birth.