The Russian finance ministry will hugely reduce daily purchases of foreign currency for state coffers in July as its extra oil and gas revenues evaporated, the ministry said on Wednesday. The ministry would buy 74.3 million roubles ($1.24 million) worth of foreign currency between July 7 and August 4 after spending 45 billion roubles on such purchases in the preceding month.
On daily basis, the forex buying will amount to around 3.5 million roubles ($58,000), the finance ministry said in a statement, down from 2.1 billion roubles between June 7 and July 6. The finance ministry started buying foreign currency on the domestic market in February to replenish the country's fiscal buffers.