The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has recently praised the performance of the Trade Bank of Iraq (TBI), which started operations in November 2003 and soon obtained guarantees for short-term credit worth US$2.4bn from 17 international export-credit agencies.
The new trade bank has been supported from the outset by an international banking consortium led by JP Morgan Chase & Company–the key to worldwide acceptance for the Iraqi bank’s letters of credit (LCs).
With just over a year of business, the bank has issued nearly 1,500 letters of credit (LCs), in euros as well as in US dollars, totalling some US$4.7bn, according to figures provided by the TBI.
