Russia's St Petersburg bank sees '09 net 1 bln rbl

MOSCOW, July 23 (Reuters) - St Petersburg Bank (BSPB.MM), one of Russia's top 30 banks by assets, expects to achieve a net profit of around 1 billion roubles ($32.19 million) this year, its chief executive officer told a press conference on Thursday.

CEO Alexander Savelyev clarified that he was referring to Russian accounting standards, but that these figures would be "extremely close" to IFRS figures.

The bank has so far stayed in the black despite a sharp increase in provisions against bad loans [ID:nLB370694] and JP Morgan recently raised its shares to overweight from neutral.

"Provisions will reach the 10-11 billion roubles level by year-end, whith total bad loans climbing to 6 billion roubles. In that case the bank will show net profit around 1 billion roubles," Savelyev said.

The bank reported a net profit of 304.2 million roubles for the first half of this year according to Russian accounting standards.

As of June 30 provisions at the bank remained at the 8.5 billion roubles level while the share of bad loans in the total credit portfolio has reached 3.24 percent.

(Reporting by Denis PInchuk, writing by Dmitry Sergeyev; Editing by David Cowell)