OREANDA-NEWS. March 22, 2013. VTB First Deputy President Vasily Titov on 20 March spoke at a session of the B20 Finance Task Force held to coincide with Russian Business Week, an annual event run by the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.

The session – given the title “Restoring Confidence in the International Financial System to Support Economic Growth” – brought together members of the B20 Finance Task Force and international financial experts, and identified a number of issues that will be used to formulate recommendations for G20 leaders.

Speakers included Vasily Titov, First Deputy President and Chairman of VTB Bank Management Board; Ksenia Yudaeva, Chief of the Presidential Experts Directorate and Russia’s G20 Sherpa; Stuart Lawson, Executive Director of Ernst & Young; Dmitry Dmitriev, Global Co-Head of Research at VTB Capital; Edouard Francois de Lencquesaing, Managing Director of the European Institute of Financial Regulation; Catherine Minard, International Relations Director at MEDEF; and Mark Burrows, Credit Suisse Vice Chairman for Investment Banking in Asia Pacific.

The list of final recommendations for the G20 leaders will be presented during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 20-22, 2013.

For reference:
Business 20 (B20) brings together major companies, banks and business associations to support an ongoing dialogue between the business community, the governments of the Group of Twenty (G20) and relevant international institutions.

Andrey Kostin, VTB Bank President and Chairman of the Management Board, heads the B20 Financial Stability Taskforce, which is working on proposals to help restore confidence in the financial system.

B20 meetings were initiated following the G20 Summit in June 2010 in Toronto, the first meeting where business leaders who accompanied their heads of state and government to the event joined the discussion on global issues. Andrey Kostin attended that meeting as a representative of Russian business. The B20 meetings that followed — in Seoul (South Korea) in November 2010, in Cannes (France) in 2011 and in Los Cabos (Mexico) in 2012 — proved an effective format for cooperation between business and government in G20.

As Russia took over the presidency of G20 and B20 on December 1, 2012, the country proposed a focus on a new basis for economic growth for the B20 meeting in St Petersburg in 2013, to follow up on the agenda of the previous B20 events. The agenda of the Russian presidency includes such issues as supporting trade; freedom of investment; restoring confidence in financial system; innovation-based development; a flexible employment and labour market; and an effective dialogue between the business and the government. A special target taskforce has been set up to focus on each of these issues, comprising leaders of business associations, B20 members and heads of interested companies.