Tbilisi (GBC) - Global Finance evaluated the performance of Natia Turnava with the lowest score among the heads of European central banks. According to them, the Acting President of the National Bank of Georgia Natia Turnava deserves a D rating. According to the publication, Natia Turnava is formally appointed governor and the NBG has been dragged into Georgia’s increasingly bitter political divisions.
"Acting head of the National Bank of Georgia (NBG) since June 2023, amid controversy over what was regarded as a highly political appointment, Natia Turnava has yet to be formally appointed governor. But that has been the least of her problems, as she and the NBG have been dragged into Georgia’s increasingly bitter political divisions.
Questions were raised over her judgment in September 2023, when she failed to enforce international sanctions on Georgia’s former prosecutor general Otar Partskhaladze—who has close connections to Russian President Vladimir Putin—claiming that the freezing of a Georgian individual’s assets could be enforced domestically only by a Georgian court. Her controversial stand led to three top-level resignations from the NBG and a rebuke from Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili, who called on her to resign.
Turnava has also been obliged to spend foreign currency to prop up the lari last May, despite fierce opposition from all other political parties, the president, and the EU, which subsequently suspended membership negotiations with Georgia. This was at the height of antigovernment demonstrations against the country’s so-called foreign agents law. According to Fitch Ratings, international reserves dropped from a peak of $5.4 billion in August 2023 to $4.6 billion in June of this year, that decline beginning soon after the start of Turnava’s tenure.
She has done nothing to dispel concerns about her conduct last September, and her closeness to the governing Georgian Dream party has undermined confidence.
In June, Fitch Ratings warned that “perceived risks to the independence of the NBG could erode policy credibility, potentially weakening the capacity of Georgia’s small, open and dollarized economy to respond to external shocks.”
As regards monetary policy, the NBG has followed a broadly tight strategy, with rates cut to 8% in May, against inflation of 2% at that time, although high levels of dollarization impact policy transmission. Inflation peaked at 2.2% in June, then subsided to 1% by August", - the publication writes.
The heads of the central banks of Denmark, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Switzerland and the European Union earned the highest grades - A+.
After Georgia, the President of the Central Bank of Poland, Adam Glapinski, earned the lowest score - C.
