FAS accused banks of imposing salary projects

As one of the prerequisites for obtaining a soft loan for representatives of small and medium-sized businesses, banks put forward a requirement to open a salary project for them.

The program of concessional lending, Izvestia notes, was launched in the pandemic specifically to support small and medium-sized businesses. At the same time, the state did not require the recipients of funds to take part in the bank's salary projects for the sake of a preferential loan. In April 2020, within the framework of anti-crisis assistance to business, the state provided entrepreneurs with the opportunity to obtain loans to pay salaries at 0% per annum.

“The Federal Antimonopoly Service has established signs of unfair competition in the actions of banks. Similar facts were revealed", - said "Prime".

The FAS sent warnings to banks caught in the imposition of services. At the same time, the service did not specify the names of the banks, noting only that the credit institutions had eliminated the violations in full.

Market participants noted that many banks, including the largest, put forward the requirement to open salary projects in front of borrowers on preferential loans.

After the end of the first year of the pandemic, many of the benefits introduced to support the population and business began to decline. One of the significant cuts affected preferential mortgage rates. Interest on loans sharply increased following the rise in the key rate of the Central Bank, making mortgages much less accessible to the borrowers against the background of a sharp rise in cost per square meter is almost throughout the country.