Tashkent
Uzbekistan is eyeing a green debt sale that would be marketed as a sukuk in a package that would appeal to the Islamic financial world. Atabek Nazirov, director of Uzbekistan’s Capital Markets Development Agency, discussed the planned debt issuance with Bloomberg in an interview. Uzbekistan sold its first international bond took as recently as last year. The $1bn debut sovereign bond, offered in February 2019 as word of the Central Asian nation opening up its economy continued to spread around the world, was a smash hit. Final books stood at $3.8bn with orders from around 150 institutional investor. Nazirov said the new green and Islamic debt issuance could help the mainly-Muslim country raise money from local and international borrowers while also deepening its financial markets. In order to establish a legal framework for the project, Nazirov is currently working with the Islamic Development Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). “We need a whole range of financial products,” Nazirov said. “If you look at other markets, Uzbekistan is 30 years behind. We are just trying to get them in as soon as we can. There is a potential market for both sukuk and non-sukuk bonds.” Islamic finance currently makes up a tiny proportion of the $950bn global green bond market.—Agencies
