DUSHANBE, December 18, Asia-Plus - next year, the National Bank of Tajikistan (NBT) will start projecting a bill on credit history.  

Shamsullo Davlatov, head of the NBT legal department, said in interview with Asia-Plus that this bill is needed to reduce the risk on providing loans.    

According to him, this law is necessary to mitigate risk that customer will not repay a loan and interest on it.  “This year, Tajik specialists have studied experience of other countries that already adopted the credit history law,” The Tajik central bank official said, noting that using this experience Tajikistan will employ its model of credit history. 

“Work on drafting the credit history law will start next year and in parallel, study of experience of other countries will continue,” said Davlatov, “It will take practically a year to draft the credit history year.”  By the end of 2007, the bill will have been submitted for consideration to the government, according to him.   

Credit history or credit report is, in many countries, a record of an individual''s or company''s past borrowing and repaying, including information about late payments and bankruptcy.  The term ‘credit reputation’ can either be used synonymous to credit history or credit score. 

According to Davaltov, under the credit history bill when a customer fills out an application for credit from a bank, their infromation is forawarded to a credit bureau, along with constant updates on the status of their credit accounts, address or any other changes they may have made since the last time they applied for any credit.  This information is used by lender to determine an individual''s or entity''s credit worthiness; that is, deteremining an individual’s or entity’s means and willingness to repay an indebtness.  This helps mitigate the risk of loss due to a debtor’s nonpayment of a loan and determine whether to extend credit, and on what terms.  

According to Tajik central bank, commercial banks in Tajikistan have provided 1.222 billion somonis in loans over the first ten months of this year.  A total volume of repaid loans for the report period has amounted to 995 million somonis.