YEREVAN, June 2. /ARKA/. Armenian banks' total deposits stand now at about 3 trillion drams, a Prosperous Armenia party lawmaker Mikael Melkumyan said today when presenting a set of draft amendments to the law on Individual Bank Deposit Insurance.

The proposed amendments call for raising the maximum amount of insured bank deposit in Armenian drams to 16 million drams from the current 10 million drams, and to the equivalent of 7 million drams for deposits in foreign currency from the current 5 million drams.

He said there are at least one million depositors with nearly half of them having deposits in drams, and the other half in foreign currency.

He also added that deposits were earlier equal to 5.4% of GDP, falling now to 4.95%, which he blamed on the coronavirus pandemic.

He said although 98% of deposits are insured, a detailed examination reveals that they constitute only 41.5% of the total deposits.

"The remaining approximately 60% are large depositors, which are few, but their share in the total volume is too large," said the deputy.

According to him, all these data indicate that it is time to increase the upper limits of insured deposits. ($1 – 483.02 drams). -0-