Russian overdue individual debts on bank...
"As of mid-2009, more than 860,000 cases of individual overdue debts to banks alone worth more than 150 billion rubles [$5 billion] were in court procedures," Ivan Oskolkov, head of the Economic Development Ministry"s corporate management department, said in an interview with Izvestia daily.
Oskolkov said the actual amount of individual overdue debts could even be larger as it also included unpaid taxes and informal loans that citizens extended among themselves in personal written pledges.
As the economic and financial meltdown caused by the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States spread quickly around the globe, severely affecting emerging economies, including Russia, many Russians have lost their jobs or proved unable to repay loans on time.
Russia, which has an outdated housing stock, launched an ambitious program of housing mortgage lending several years ago to encourage individuals to obtain loans from banks to buy new housing.