As it is known, on 4th of November the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) will come into force. SSM is a framework in which the European Central Bank (ECB) will conduct direct supervision of largest banks of the euro area. Being assisted by national supervisory authorities, the ECB will attend to safety and soundness of the European banking system.

On 4 June 2014, the president Vladimir Putin signed Federal Law on Russian Federation Citizenship and legislative acts requiring Russian citizens with foreign passports to report their second citizenship or foreign residency permit to the Federal Migration Service (FMS) with the announced deadline of 2 October 2014.

Despite the difficult geopolitical and macroeconomic situation resulting periodically in radical price fluctuations in the financial markets, our mutual funds managed by ABLV Asset Management, IPAS are showing rather good results.

From 22^nd to 23^rd of October in Riga already second in a row an international conference and exhibition Intax Wealth Latvia, dedicated to asset planning of individuals and wealth structuring of affluent clients, will take place. Our bank is one of the event’s sponsors.

In September, the ECB and the FRS particularly influenced the global financial market as careful attention was compelled to the results of these meetings.

In the beginning of August, the global financial markets were heavily under the influence of geopolitics with reference to new escalation in the ‘sanction war’ between West and Russia. Russian sanctions launched in response — the ban to import food products, mostly hurt the EU states and made investors think over prospects of European economy development, taking into account not really impressive current economic situation in many countries.

During the first half of 2014, the bank and other companies of ABLV Group continued to grow, due to consistent implementation of the group’s development strategy. Although the situation in several our target markets was complex and strained, we managed to achieve planned results due to our thoroughly chosen business model, risk management, and cautious policy.

In the global stock market, July turned to be challenging, being influenced by various dynamics in the securities markets in different regions of the world. The US markets and markets of emerging countries felt quite stable.

June turned to be rather boring in the financial markets; it was determined by the activity decay practically in all segments of the market due to the beginning of summer season.

May, in spite of its bad reputation due to a famous saying “Sell in May and go away” turned to be successful for investors both in the stock and bond markets. At the beginning of the month in the stock markets certain nervousness still remained, which was caused by continuous political tension in Ukraine and the anticipation of the elections to the European Parliament with potential risk of “ultra-rights” and “euro-skeptics” getting the majority of seats. It could have caused the atmosphere of political instability in Europe and complicated the process of decision making.