MOSCOW, November 28 (RAPSI) – There are no black lists of banks the licenses of which the Central Bank may revoke, Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina said Wednesday at a meeting with the heads of the largest Russian banks.

Ms. Nabiullina assured the bankers that the rumor about these black lists is nothing but a rumor, Vedomosti newspaper wrote on Thursday. A banker who attended the meeting told the newspaper that the Central Bank managers said there would be no mass revocation of licenses and that there is no reason for concern.

The bankers asked the regulator to carefully consider the information background of a license revocation, because clients react to it by moving their deposits to state banks and therefore create major problems for small regional banks, another banker said. Ms. Nabiullina accepted their reasoning, saying that the Central Bank should explain its actions so as to prevent panic, a banker said.

On November 20, the Central Bank of Russia revoked the operating license of Moscow-based Master Bank. The bank operated a large network of ATMs, serviced card payments for almost a third of the country's banks and had issued cards to about 3 million people, according to media reports.

Central Bank officials earlier expressed their support for an offer by state-owned Sberbank, the country's largest lender, to assume responsibility for all of Master Bank’s payment processing services.

Cash transaction fees in Russia have risen in the aftermath of the revocation of Master Bank's license, according to Vedomosti.