BRICS leaders to meet twice for summit talks this year under Russian presidency

MOSCOW, April 3. /TASS/. BRICS grouping of emerging market economies, in which Russia assumed the rotating chair on Wednesday, will meet for summit talks twice this year, Russian Foreign Ministry Ambassador-at-Large Vadim Lukov said on Friday. "The program of [Russia’s] presidency includes 120 events, which will be held in 16 cities," Lukov said commenting on the plans for the group, which also includes Brazil, India, China and South Africa. "There will be a total of 19 meetings at the ministerial level." "The [BRICS] leaders will gather twice and it will be on July 8-9 at the summit in Ufa and either on November 15 or 16 on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Antalya," Lukov, who is the Russian Foreign Ministry’s coordinator for the BRICS issues, added. Speaking on April 1, when Russia official assumed the rotating chair in the organization, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that the main tasks of the country’s presidency in the BRICS group were the establishment and the commencement of operations of the New Development Bank and the creation of a pool of currency reserves. The agreement on the multilateral development bank seen as an alternative to the US-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund was signed in mid-July 2014 at the 6th BRICS summit in Fortaleza, Brazil. The BRICS New Development Bank will have an authorized capital of $100 billion. Russia’s Finance Ministry has said it expects the New Development Bank to start working by late 2015 and reach full-scale operations in 4-5 years. Earlier in the week Lukov said that compared with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which is primarily focused on Asia, the BRICS New Development Bank will deal with projects in the grouping’s five countries, as well as projects in other countries in a proportion of two to one. Under an agreement between the BRICS countries, the Bank’s first president will be from India and the first chairman of the board of directors will be from Brazil while a representative of Russia will be the first chairman of the bank’s board of governors. The bank will be headquartered in Shanghai, China. Read more