Central Bank denies rumors about denomination

A rumor circulating on the Internet and officially denied claims that the national currency will be exchanged for new banknotes in a ratio of 10,000:1 and that old and new banknotes will be in parallel circulation until 2025.

“These reports have no basis, today the issue of denomination of the currency unit is not envisaged by the Government of the Republic of Uzbekistan and the Central Bank,” the official information of the Ministry of Finance said.

Rumors about the denomination in Uzbekistan and the attitude of the authorities

For information, denomination is the reduction of the denomination (written value) of paper money in order to simplify calculations. In this case, large-denomination bills are exchanged for new, small-denomination bills.

In Uzbekistan, in 1994, the soum-coupon was denominated in the soum at a ratio of 1000:1.

The issue of changing the currency to a new currency was discussed last time in 2019. Even then, there were reports on social networks that the new currency will be put into circulation at a ratio of 10,000:1, and that the money on the plastic card will automatically lose four zeros from January 1, 2020. However, the Central Bank rejected these reports.

At the beginning of 2019, there were reports in a number of mass media that President Shavkat Mirziyoyev gave an instruction to print a new 100,000 soum note with a later denomination of the currency, the Central Bank informed that there will be no denomination.

At the beginning of March 2019, the Chairman of the Central Bank, Mamarizo Nurmurodov, stated that the task of changing the denomination of the national currency was not set in Uzbekistan.

But after that, in June 2019, the officials of the Central Bank did not reject the possibility of denomination.

“The purpose of implementing the denomination is to reduce the number of zeros. We cannot say that the denomination was not planned. We thought about it. There will be a denomination sometime. Maybe in 5 years, maybe in 10 years,” Ilhom Norkulov, the first deputy chairman of the CB at that time, said.