OREANDA-NEWS.  January 17, 2014. VTB Group announces that its Russian subsidiaries, including VTB 24, Bank of Moscow and VTB Insurance, are terminating their contractual relationships with Fitch Ratings due to the continued lack of professionalism demonstrated by the ratings agency.

As previously noted, VTB Bank, the Group’s parent company, terminated its contractual relationship with Fitch in 2012. Since that time the agency has not had access to non-public information that the bank makes available to other ratings agencies, and therefore does not have the data necessary to make qualified assessments of VTB’s creditworthiness.

Despite this, Fitch has continued to assign ratings to VTB Bank and its subsidiaries solely on its own initiative and with no interaction between VTB and the agency’s analysts.