March 17 (SeeNews) - Croatia's central bank will resume its auctions for direct purchase of kuna-denominated government bonds as of March 18, it said.
The central bank, HNB made the announcement in a statement on Monday, without giving further details.
On Tuesday, the central bank said in a separate statement it has decided to allow domestic pension and investment fund managers, as well as local insurers to also participate in the purchase and sale of government securities it organises, if they can prove they are financially stable and can meet certain technical criteria.
On Friday, HNB said it has started purchasing government bonds in order to maintain the stability of the domestic market of government securities. The move is part of the measures the central bank is taking to mitigate the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the domestic financial market.
As part of the measures, the central bank placed on Monday 3.8 billion kuna ($552 million/500 million euro) in an extraordinary five-year structural repo auction, at a fixed interest rate of 0.25%. At the same time, it also placed 750 million kuna at a fixed interest rate of 0.30% in a regular one-week repo auction.
These moves go along with HNB intervening already four times on the foreign exchange market since March 9, selling a total of 1.62 billion euro to local banks in order to prop up the weakening kuna currency.
Prior to that, the bank had not been selling euro on the interbank market in almost four and a half years.
(1 euro = 7.57986 kuna)