The European Central Bank (ECB), nine leading international banks that operate in central and eastern Europe have gathered together to ask for help in the region, according to the Businessweek.
The banks argue that funds to boost liquidity and restart lending should not be limited to the new EU member states however, but instead should also be offered to states beyond the bloc, such as Serbia and the Ukraine. “We fought for 50 years, many of us, to get these countries away from communism and now we have a free market economy in the region, we can’t leave them alone when there is an extremely harsh wind blowing,” Herbert Stepic, chief executive of Raiffeisen International.