Moody’s Investors Service said that it upgraded the foreign-currency deposit rating of RCB Bank by two notches to B1 and its baseline credit assessment to B2 citing its strong solvency and the expected continuation of its links to Russia’s state-owned VTB Bank, owner of 46.3% of its shareholding.

Deposits in the country’s banking system recorded an increase of around half a billion euro in July while loans declined by €358.7 million, data released recently by the Central Bank of Cyprus show.

The Public Debt Management Office (PDMO) received applications for six-year government bonds for physical persons, the 9th series (September 2017), valued at €6.49 million.

Bank of Cyprus, the island’s largest lender said that it generated in the first six months of the year a net loss of €554m compared to a net profit of€54m in the respective period of 2016 on increased provisions.

Bank of Cyprus’ chief executive officer John Hourican said that the island’s high levels of delinquent loans of roughly half of the banking system’s total loans requires a change in the values of Cypriot society as they pose a fragility for the economy.

Finance Minister Harris Georgiades said that while the government plans to keep its citizenship by investment scheme inplace, it may consider a cap on the number of beneficiaries, already exceeding 1,000 since 2013, according to press reports.

APS Holdings aims at reducing the ratio of Hellenic Bank’s delinquent portfolio to a quarter of current levels possibly in the medium-term, and sees opportunities in the recovering real estate sector even as the current legislative framework to reduce bad loans requires improvement, a director said.

A social mobility report by Eurofound, the EU Agency for the improvement of living and working conditions, shows that Cyprus, Finland, Greece and Poland have changed the most, having seen massive mobility out of agriculture towards manufacturing and services over the last generation or so.

The central government’s revenue in the first seven months of 2017 rose by €438m, to almost €3.5bn, on a cash basis, compared to the respective period last year, the Treasury said.

Public debt reached €19.3bn in June 2017, up from €19.1bn at the end of March, and €18.7bn at the end of June last year, the Public Debt Management Office (PDMO) said.