Uzbekistan will issue and place sovereign bonds next year, Kun.uz correspondent reports with reference to the presidential decree.

Bonds will be issued at a fixed coupon rate of at least $500 million with a maturity of 5 years or more.

It is planned that the funds received from the placement of bonds will be used to implement various infrastructure projects, as well as to cover the budget deficit.

Earlier, investment consultant Rainer Michael Pryss said that Uzbekistan’s issuance of $300 million in Eurobonds could lead the country into a large-scale crisis in emerging markets.

A well-known businessman, founder and leader of the Korzinka.uz network, Zafar Khashimov, called this forecast complete nonsense.

“Bonds worth $300 million and even several times more can no longer do anything with our economy. Not one way or the other. There are hundreds, if not thousands a day, of such transactions on global financial sites almost unnoticed,” the businessman said on his Facebook page.

These bonds, he believes, are just a sensor that will determine where Uzbekistan’s credit rating is in the global financial map.

“But this is a very important step and a great experience for us as a nation, if we have ambitions to ever become a member of the global financial market. Let’s put an end to 300 million sovereign Eurobonds. I hope you don’t need to be a Nobel laureate in economics or a professor of mathematics in order to understand the disproportionate marginality of the amount of these bonds in the scale of our country's economy. I think everything is clear with the threats of an “expert,” he wrote.

It is worth noting that recently, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings have assigned the first sovereign ratings to Uzbekistan.