Nomos Bank’s Net Profit Tumbles 59% on Corporate Bond Loss

(Updates with analyst comment in third paragraph.)

Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Nomos Bank, a Russian lender whose shares are trading in London, said third-quarter profit fell 59 percent because of a trading loss on corporate bonds.

Net income dropped to 713 million rubles ($23 million) from 1.74 billion rubles in the year-earlier period, according to a statement on the lender’s website today. Trading losses of 2.9 billion rubles were mostly attributable to a “negative revaluation” of fixed-income securities caused by market volatility, the bank said. Losses partially recovered by mid- November, it added.

“The weakness was mainly the result of trading and forex losses incurred by the investment banking segment,” Leonid Slipchenko, a banking analyst at UralSib Financial Corp., wrote in a report e-mailed today.

Nomos’s shares in Moscow fell 0.1 percent to 615 rubles by the close, erasing an earlier gain of as much as 5.6 percent.

--Editors: Jon Menon, Edward Evans

To contact the reporter on this story: Torrey Clark in Moscow at tclark8@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Brad Cook at bcook7@bloomberg.net