OREANDA-NEWS. In accordance with the Interest Rates Act (340/2002), the reference rate for the period 1 January – 30 June 2015 is 0.5%. The penalty interest rate for the same period is thus 7.5% pa (under section 4 of the Act, the reference rate plus seven percentage points).

The penalty interest rate applicable to commercial contracts is 8.5% pa (under section 4a of the Act, the reference rate plus eight percentage points). The higher penalty interest rate referred to in section 4a of the Act is applied to payments made by enterprises to other enterprises or by authorities to enterprises.

Under the Interest Rates Act, the reference rate used in defining the penalty rate is the interest rate that was applied by the European Central Bank to the last main refinancing operation prior to the first calendar day of the half-year in question and rounded up to the nearest one-half percentage point. Such reference rate is effective for the following six-month period.