Russia is planning to launch a new state-owned investment agency next year to invest the country’s oil wealth in global financial markets, finance minister Anton Siluanov tells Euromoney in an exclusive interview.

Talks on the restructuring of GKOs - Russian treasury bills on which the government defaulted last August - have once more been cast into disarray just days before a deadline imposed by the Russian finance ministry was due to expire.

Reform of the Soviet financial system is causing tension between the newly-licensed banks and Gosbank, the state monolith-turned-supervisor. It seems that the co-operative banks are leading the drive towards such free market practices as client confidentiality. Ron Cooper reports from Moscow on what officials of one co-op bank and Gosbank say about each other.

On September 26 last year, a new Russian revolution got under way: a quiet revolution, which has passed almost unnoticed in the West.

Moscow is the centre for five important banking institutions, including the two Comecon organizations, IIB and IBEC. At the top of the tree is Gosbank, the state bank for the USSR. The chairman of its board of directors, Vladimir Sergeyevich Alkhimov, is not a member of the Politburo, but he probably has more power than many of its members.

They share the same ideology. Each is based in Moscow. But the bankers at Kopievski Lane like to compete with the bankers at Presnenski Val, and it seems that recently the competition developed into a race.