Currency easing from the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) does not solve the problems of large businesses; due to NBU restrictions, large businesses in the country do not have access to Western capital markets and cannot pay off creditors.

As the head of the project office of the Metinvest group Oleksandr Vodoviz said in his column on the website of the Economichna Pravda publication, Ukrainian business has been operating for more than two years under the conditions of strict currency restrictions that the National Bank introduced immediately after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. At first, this helped stabilize the financial system of the warring country, and over time the regulator began to weaken foreign exchange controls.

According to him, the largest easing package was introduced in May 2024. For the first time since 2022, businesses were allowed to take foreign currency abroad to pay loans and dividends. Although this solution turned out to be very limited and does not allow the business to develop due to the introduction of transfer limits of several million dollars per year.

"Big business has been waiting for this decision for a long time, but cannot take advantage of it, because it does not take into account the specifics and scale of our work. Metinvest's loan portfolio at the end of last year was about $2 billion, and 95% of borrowings were made in the West," Vodoviz said.

He said the company does not have access to Western capital markets, but has obligations to creditors and must pay $250-300 million annually. So, the easing of currency restrictions from the NBU with a limit of $4 million per year does absolutely nothing for large players, namely they are the main lenders to Western banks and other financial institutions.

"A similar situation has developed for most large companies in the Ukrainian economy. Let's take Ferrexpo, ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih, or Interpipe, or Kernel as an example – each company has a loan portfolio exceeding a billion dollars and none of them can be credited for border," the top manager said.

According to him, to ensure loan payments, the company has to look for non-trivial solutions. Metinvest currently raises trade finance through its trade offices abroad. That is, the group "replaces long money with short money, and this is nonsense."

"This cannot continue for long, because a series of defaults will begin – this will affect the ratings of the country as a whole. It is not for nothing that Russians do not allow their corporate borrowers to default, realizing that this affects the cost of borrowing for the entire country," the head of the office said.

Vodoviz said the company understands that the NBU wants to prevent the massive withdrawal of funds abroad. But the regulator has all the tools to control the movement of funds, which, if anything happens, will stop the illegal outflow of capital. In particular, it is possible to trace the company's payment chain. And if the money was not used to pay off debt obligations, the company can be fined and further foreign exchange transactions prohibited.

He said the problem for Ukrainian business is not only limited access to credit resources, but also financing that allows them to cover military risks.

"We believe that international financial institutions and our partners could help find a suitable solution in this situation. Metinvest, for its part, is communicating with the Ministry of Economy about the possibility of attracting financing for these purposes within the framework of the Ukraine Facility mechanism, which has an investment component in the amount of EUR 7 billion," the top manager said.

Metinvest is a vertically integrated group of mining and metallurgical enterprises. The group's enterprises are located mainly in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions. The main shareholders of the holding are the SCM group (71.24%) and Smart Holding (23.76%), which jointly manage it. Metinvest Holding LLC is the management company of the Metinvest group.