We had our operating income at a consolidated basis up by 14%, sorry, by 12%, and our costs were up by 4%. We had jaws of about 8%, which is in line with where we want to go. It has solid jaws. I think the other important fact was what was driving the growth in operating income was really a strong performance in our NIMS, which grew quite significantly and was due to an increase in our NIMS from 2.4% to 2.7%. I think this is an important factor, and we expect to be able to maintain this going forward, if not trying to improve it. That's always our endeavor. We are saying that we will maintain that. The other factor which I think is important is that we got an improved contribution from our international associates. If you look at NBO, they had a better performance this year, almost up to QAR 100 million, and that is up about 60% compared to 2020. Similarly for UAB, from a net loss position, they've gone to a positive. Whilst the numbers itself I think are not huge, they're showing the trend line of where we expect the business to go. We have a clear plan for NBO, which I think will be the largest contributor going forward, and UAB has also got a trend line of improvement. I think that's important. In terms of our last international operation, which is Turkey, of course, Turkey was affected by the currency. When you translate, obviously, that has halved in value. We see some stabilization in the Turkish lira. Of course, it's an open question how and where that will go. For our mind, all the measures that we took in earlier years to reduce our foreign currency lending, et cetera, have all stood us in good stead. Our net interest, sorry, our NPLs in Turkey are down to 2.5% as compared to the market of 4%. We are managing Turkey for risk and making sure that we have a stable business there. That's the sort of underlying business, and Rehan will speak to that in more detail. The one thing is, what I would say is that what has probably surprised everyone, and I'm very aware of it, is on the provision line. That provision, obviously, has been much larger than was expected and was larger than we were planning to do, and there's a reason for that. That's primarily around COVID. All of us were expecting COVID to peter down by the end of the year, and unfortunately, Omicron started and then it's got much worse, the fourth wave. Even all the forbearance measures were continued in Qatar till March, and my feeling is they're likely to be continuing further, maybe by another three months. Again, that'll be the call of the central bank. I expect, and because of that, we decided that we are going to provision on additional amounts on many names so that we can, whilst our profits are strong, we will use that to also build up some provisioning. I think the one thing that this whole COVID has shown us is that there's a lot of uncertainty, and it's been very difficult to predict. We prefer to build provisions now from our healthy profits, then we can always have the luxury of deciding what to do if we don't need them. At this stage, we will continue to build these provisions as a measure of prudence. The other factor which I think affected people was the NPL ratio going up. It went up from 4.3 to 4.7. Now, actually, there was one very large loan, which we got a major payment, and we were able to then restructure, which actually moved from stage 3 NPL to stage 2. If we had just taken that, we could have reduced our NPL ratio from 4.3 to about 3.2%. We felt that that was probably not the right thing to do given the COVID, given forbearance is still going on. We actually used the opportunity to NPL two other names that we had in stage 2. That, again, is a measure of conservatism. I see the trend is that we will address some names and get them out. We may address conservatively some others. That'll be a moving sort of ratio. It'll go up and down, maybe 0.5%, not from here, but down and up in that range. This is the sort of approach that we are taking. Rather than just take a reduced NPL straight away, we decided we'd be more conservative. That's the reason why we have that slight increase. The last one, I think, which has also affected people is the dividends. Given that in 2019, because I was talking about pre-COVID days, the normal days, we paid a dividend of approximately 20% on a lower profit. This year, we only paid 16%. The challenge is, we have always said our policy is to pay a maximum of 50%. The challenge has been that because of the Turkish lira depreciation, our foreign currency translation and other effects eroded a lot of our earnings. This is the amount that we could pay. I see this as a one-off hit coming from the Turkish lira depreciation. Therefore, we would, going forward, actually restore our dividend to more, I think, realistic levels, and the board is also committed to that. That's the background to the dividend being perhaps slightly lower, and frankly, lower than what we would have normally paid out. Unfortunately, the reality of the impact of the Turkish lira was almost QAR 1.1 billion on our earnings. Overall, not on earnings after tax. Our profits are net profit. That's the highlight. Overall, I kind of addressed some of these issues upfront. Overall look, the outlook for 2022, as I said earlier last time, I still think this is probably the most positive time that I've seen in the last five years. Oil and gas prices remain high. You've got the World Cup coming, and with COVID I was in December at the FIFA Arab Cup, where the stadium has 60,000 people in it. It shows that you can, even in COVID, have a full stadium, and they managed it quite well. You're also seeing, I would say, continued investment. The government's fiscal position will remain strong. I think they'll be in a budget surplus because their breakeven levels are in the $40 per barrel of oil equivalent, where now oil is in the 80s, and oil and gas is actually much higher in terms of barrel of oil equivalent price. That remains strong. Continued investment, expansions, you have Hamad Port. All that remains on track and, therefore, I believe that the outlook remains positive and no change from what I indicated six months ago. Sorry, at the last quarterly call. With that, I'll hand it over to Rehan, who can talk to you in more detail. If you have other questions, of course, we'll address them after Rehan. Thank you. Thank you, Joseph, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll focus mainly on slide seven here, which is in front of you. As a reminder, we have the reported numbers on the right-hand side, and on the left-hand side, what we have done is normalized those numbers. This is to really take out the impact of IFRS 2, which has an impact on both income and cost as a result of the staff performance scheme that we have. As you know, there is net no impact at operating profit level. You can see QAR 998 in Q4 of this year, QAR 998 in the reported also, because we have an underlying hedge, which fully takes care of those movements. Now we look at the normalized columns, which basically gives you the underlying performance of the bank. I'll start firstly with the lending volume. As you can see, we have QAR 98 billion in loans at the end of 2021. This is down 3.1% quarter-on-quarter, but up 1.3% year-on-year. I'll just break that down a little bit. In Qatar, the loan book has actually grown 5.8% year-on-year. As we've discussed in the past, the government had temporary overdrafts in the banking system, but given the liquidity that it has, it has been paying that back, including in the last quarter. If I was to add back the impact of that, we'd actually see a loan growth of about 9% year-on-year. About another 3% on top of the 5.8% that we already have. Actually, what I wanted to demonstrate is actually the underlying business is very strong. There is growth going on in our core business, and our proportion of the government and public sector is growing as well. Obviously, the second part of that is the impact of the Turkish lira. Alternatif have actually grown their loan book year-on-year, but when you convert it to QAR, given the depreciation, it actually shows about a QAR 4 billion decrease in the business on a consolidated basis for us. I think that is the reality, of course, and that's why the numbers show QAR 98 billion. Probably our underlying growth is between 8% and 9% that we've seen during the year. That puts us in a very good position as we go into 2022. You can see our operating income has been growing each quarter. Even in quarter four, it's up 6.3% versus previous quarter. Our overall growth in income is 12.4%, led by our net interest margins. We've been very focused on improving those. You can see that has improved from 2.4% to 2.7%, focusing very much on the cost of funding. That has really helped us. Some of the products that we are working on generate very good low-cost deposits. That's up 5% year-on-year. That's why we think that this momentum will go into 2022. There's no one-offs in our net interest income, net interest margin. We think that that will continue well into 2022 and generate further income. On our costs, it's been fairly flat quarter-on-quarter, up 4% year-on-year. As you can see, overall, our operating profit is up 15.3% year-on-year and 8.6% quarter-on-quarter. That, as we'd, I think, indicated in previous quarters, we now expect revenue to be the main driver of our cost income ratio improvements. That stands at 22.2% for the quarter and 24.1% for the year versus 26% last year. In Commercial Bank here in Qatar, the cost income ratio now is 20.5%. We expect this trend to continue in 2022 with further reductions in our cost income ratio. As far as provisions go, Joseph has explained that in a fair amount of detail. We do think that given the extension of the QCB forbearance schemes, the COVID situation, and also I think just coupled with the counter-cyclical approach that we have, we deemed it appropriate to increase our provisioning. We've also moved some accounts staging-wise. As Joseph mentioned, we had one very large recovery. It didn't have a P&L impact, but it was a very large recovery, and we did move a few more accounts into stage 3. As you know, we're more focused on cost of risk rather than the NPL ratio. I think that will be a little in and out with the names. Our cost of risk now stands at 111 basis points on a net basis, and I think that's the kind of area we expect between 100 and 111 and 110 for 2022 as well. In terms of our associates' performance, I think two things to say here. Firstly, both UAB and NBO are showing an improved performance year-on-year. We believe that will continue. Very strong management in place at NBO in particular, which is the larger contributor out of the two. UAB have turned a loss in 2020 into a profit in 2021. In addition to that, we've taken an impairment of QAR 291 million in 2021 for UAB. We believe now this is the end of those large impairments, and now it's going to really revert to a BAU process once a year at the end of the year. I think now the numbers, working very closely with our auditors, we now think that the numbers going forward are going to be sub QAR 100 million on an annual basis, given the current market conditions. I think that was a very important objective for us, to ensure that that is not an issue for Commercial Bank going forward. I think we've addressed that over the last couple of years. 2021, I think, signals the end of those large impairments for our associates. Then lastly, I'll just talk about the capital position. As you can see, our ratios remain very strong. Our CET1 was impacted by the currency depreciation in the Turkish lira. As Joseph mentioned, that does impact our ability to pay dividends. However, our ratios are well above QCB requirements, Basel requirements, and compare very favorably with the rest of the market. With that, I'll hand you over to Kaan Bey to talk a little bit more detail on the Turkish business, then we can go to the questions and answers. Thank you, Mr. Rehan. Good afternoon. I would like to skip on our last page, especially the last quarter financial results. We better go on the details, I'm sure that you're going to have some questions, Q&A session, I'm going to catch up those questions. First of all, I would like to say that when you look into our last quarter financials, you can see that including the year to date performances, 37% year to date growth in assets, including, of course, the currency impact there. The most important thing is here, as I always emphasize that we are very selective, especially on the lending side. As we all, including Mr. Joseph, focusing on the management of the risk factors in the sector, as I can expand, we are very careful and cautious, especially on the lending approach. I could say that, for example, in 2021, our fixed loans decreased by, in nominal terms, over than USD 300 million. You can see here, total loans grew by 18%, and the 15% comes from the last quarter. It is the effect of the very aggressive depreciation of Turkish lira against especially USD. We are in the position to convert the total loan book in favor of Turkish lira. I think this is very important optimizing efforts of the managing the loan book portfolio in a successful performances. At the same time, I can say that we are focusing on the Turkish lira funding cost, we are optimizing, again, funding cost there in order to especially, funding mix is important, we are increasing our share of low-ticket deposits. We are very proactive in management of fixed Turkish lira components of the funding side. When you look into, again, the total deposits grew by 46% as a total. Again, I can say that there is a good, well-managed, balanced deposit growth there. The other important thing is, it's a part of our 2021 and of course, beyond 2022, for the 5-year business plan. The digital acquisition. We are growing our digital customer base. We are investing our digital facilities, this makes us a very diversified and healthy retail deposit base. We did that over 2021, it's going to be the major situation for 2021. I can say that when you look into our, especially, the profitability, as I always insist on that and emphasizing that, starting from the second quarter, our performance is going much more better. Especially last quarter, you can see that there's a very strong operating income. Our whole profitability metrics is getting better. 2022 is going to be the better contribution from Alternatifbank to The Commercial Bank. This is going to be very solid performance in terms of profitability at the same time. When you look into our, especially, OPEX management, you can see that we have been facing over 36% CPI in Turkey, and first half of 2022, it's going to be over 50%, but we capped our OPEX below yearly inflation. In the same time, I could emphasize that we have 55 million TRY general reserves. It's a free provision. Actually, it's a kind of a strong buffer for the 2022 profitability performances. In the same time, as we are very risk-focused and very selective and those are important things. Our sizable collection performance in 2021 help us to sustain our NPL levels at 2.2%. This is considerably lower than the sectors versus private banks, foreign banks, et cetera. The most important thing is, as Rehan Bey emphasized again, of course, the cost of risk. 0.6% realization is showing our existing portfolio's quality. The last thing maybe I would like to say that, especially the coverage, it is very good managed. They increased to 149%. In the same time, the stage 2 ratio is around 12.9%, which is again in line with the private banks' averages. All in all, Alternatifbank's contribution definitely will increase in 2022 because it's a kind of transition period and very risk-focused management within the last three years. We are going to harvest the outcome of those solid approach, I believe in that from 2022. Thank you. This is all I would like to share. If you have any questions, I'm ready to answer those. Thank you. Thank you, Kaan Bey. We now move on to the Q&A session. If you want to ask a question, please use the Raise Hand feature. You could send a text to the host. When your name is announced, please go ahead, unmute, introduce yourself, and then ask the question. We already have our first question. Waleed Mohsin, please go ahead and ask your question. Yes, thank you much for the presentation. It's Waleed Mohsin from Goldman Sachs. I have three questions. First, I wanted to get your thoughts on how you see the change in the rate outlook impacting your profitability and balance sheet, given the changing rate outlook globally. If you could please comment on that, and talk about your sensitivity of your balance sheet and the P&L to that would be very useful. Secondly, I want to delve a little bit further into your cost of risk outlook for 2022. If I heard correctly, you mentioned, Rehan, 100 to 110 basis points for 2022. I want to understand how much of this is recurring and how much of this you're still thinking of it as some sort of ongoing COVID or prudence overlay, and when you get to more normalized levels, whether it's second half 2022 or whether it's 2023. The third and final question is on Turkey. I wanted to get your thoughts on the trends you're seeing on the Turkish lira deposit gathering. Obviously, December was a tough month for Turkish banks with the Turkish lira deposit costs going up. The government has introduced a few new products on the deposit side, and I was wondering if that's something which the bank has been using or has had good traction with, and if that's helped reduce the deposit costs in Turkey. Maybe a final one on Turkey, if you could also comment on plans to I saw there were some headlines mentioning that you may look to augment the capital base at Alternatifbank. Any comments on that would be very helpful. Thanks so much. Thanks, Waleed. Let me take the first half, and then I'll hand over to Kaan Bey for the Turkey deposits question that you had. Firstly, in terms of rate outlook and what impact that may have on The Commercial Bank. As far as our lending book goes, it's basically a floating rate book. Any increases in the rates would translate to higher asset yields and higher NIMS. We do have, of course, on our liability book, quite an extensive EMTN program, quite long-dated liabilities as well as you've seen about 35% of our deposit book is in low-cost funds, which are not really sensitive to rates. I think the increases in interest rates would be beneficial to the bank. We've estimated that every quarter percent adds about QAR 40 million to the bottom line. As far as cost of risk, your second question goes, yes, the guidance is 100 to 110 basis points for 2022. First half of the year, our assumption is further on the COVID schemes. The second half of the year will be more on normal, ongoing business. I think I'll just add that we do have very good collateral on the loans going into our non-performing loan book. We do have a very streamlined process within the bank now for recoveries, business, legal working together. We're pretty confident that that process will achieve good results for us in 2022 also. I'll hand you to Kaan Bey for the question on the deposit gathering, especially in the last month or so. Yeah. Thanks a lot. Thanks for the question. Actually, yes. What we have been seeing since 20th December, actually, in the market that definitely, there is a kind of the movement from the residents having those new announced TRY deposit schemes. I can say that roughly TRY 140 billion actually converted from standard TRY deposit to the treasury and central bank-backed new deposits instruments. We have seen almost the same trend in Alternatifbank. Of course, this is going to help the banking system to especially manage the cost of funding in that way. It is obvious that the trend is going to be higher and more aggressively within the whole year. The most important thing is I would like to say that here, especially in Turkey, the banking system is at the same time benefiting from the swap transactions with the central bank in order to minimize the cost of funding because there is a picture in front of us that there is a deposit cost, okay, standard, which is around 21% annual cost on it. On the other side, when you look into new announced deposit instruments, there is almost 18% or 17% cost on that. When you look into swapped mechanism and then the total cost of funding is going to decrease by something, 2%-2.5%. It is very important gap, and it's a kind of the balance that every bank in the system is trying to benefit those new announced instruments. I can say that this is going to help, especially the resident is going to trust TRY again, is going to kind of start from conversion from FX to TRY. Thank you. Waleed, you had one more question which was on capital for the subsidiary. As you know, we laid out a plan a few years ago of the amount of investment we would do in Turkey. We're still committed to that. We do review it on an annual basis of what their requirements are and their growth plans, and we're committed to invest further in Alternatifbank on a need basis. Great. Thank you much for your answers and thank you for the presentation. Thank you, Waleed. Our next question is from Rahul Bajaj. Rahul, please go ahead and ask your question. Thank you. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. This is Rahul Bajaj from Citi. I have two questions on margins and provisions. We kind of seek more clarification there and one additional question on lending growth. The first one on margins. If I remember correctly, during the third quarter call, you mentioned about 10-20 basis points Y on Y margin expansion expectation for 2022, 10-20 basis points. Where do we stand now in terms of your expectations? How do you think margin will pan out? Especially, one, we now have maybe three to four rate hikes probably baked in in the numbers for this year. On the other side, the Turkish interest rate moves. I just wanted to understand what level of cuts that we've seen in Turkish interest rates are still to flow through your margins, and they probably will have negative impact, if I'm not mistaken. Any thoughts there? That's the first question. The second question on provisioning. Completely understand this 100-110 basis points new guidance, but just wanted to understand, the earlier sort of 2022-2025, 2026 trajectory which was provided, and if I'm not mistaken, 40 basis points was suggested as the end goal for provisioning in that outlook. Do we still stand with that kind of projection? Do you think that 40 basis points is still achievable? We've seen structural changes in the business mix and the economy, and you think that maybe not 40, 60 is more likely as we go ahead in the next 2-3 years? That's my second question. The final question on loan growth. As I understand, bulk of the noise in lending growth during 2021 was due to the repayments coming from the government sector on the overdrafts. Any sense do you have on to what extent this could continue in 2022, as in oil price remains at high levels, in all likelihood, you will continue to see repayments come through from the government on these overdrafts, in 2022 as well. In that context, what kind of lending growth should we be thinking about for this year? Thank you. Thanks, Rahul. Let me take that. Firstly, in terms of margins, as you saw, we had a strong year, in 2021, going from 2.4-2.7. We are still targeting a further growth in our net interest margins. 10 basis points, I think, is probably appropriate. As you rightly mentioned, there is an offset from the Turkish business, given the reduction in interest rates expected. However, having said that's something that is very closely managed by Alternatif, and they are fairly well-positioned from a balance sheet and ALM point of view for the rate. I think 10 basis points is a conservative and achievable number as far as net interest margins go. On the provisioning, yes, we've given 100-110 basis points, and we've given the explanations for that. For longer term, Joseph, do you want to Yeah. Yeah, I think you're correct, Rahul, that we gave about 40 basis points. To my mind, given the nature of this provisioning, it doesn't mean that there's a fundamental structural change in the quality of our loan book. In fact, the loans that have been originated over the last five years, the NPL is less than 20 basis points. Sorry, yeah. Our cost for risk is going to be much lower on this new book. This is really, I would say, a kind of front-ending of what might potentially have been coming across the next few years. That's the way to look at it. 40 basis points is out there, and we will continue to target that. I believe that's the way we should look at it. It's not that we see a fundamental deterioration in the portfolio quality, which is causing this high thing. It's because of COVID, the uncertainties around it, the uncertainty around when forbearance will be removed, and what are the effects arising out of forbearance. I think this is the uncertainty which is causing us to do this. On the flip side, we have a much stronger business outlook, and we think that may have some partial offsetting influences, but we prefer to be on the conservative side for this year, definitely. Rahul, your last question was about the government temporary overdrafts. I think we can expect volatility in that number in 2022 as well. I think there will be some periods when it will go down, some periods when it will go up. Probably overall still a decline. I think countering that is a very strong pipeline that we see for ourselves in terms of loan growth going forward. There are a lot of long-term projects that we will see in Qatar, and I think Commercial Bank is very well placed to take a large part of those, whether they're in government or private. I think we will still see that loan growth of 6%-8% is our guidance for this year. Thanks, Rehan. Maybe just one quick follow-up from my side. ROEs. For 2021, you did kindly provide a kind of guidance of 10%-11%. Is there a formal guidance for 2022? Where should we expect ROEs to land for the full year? We expect ROE to continue to increase. We're looking at 12% for our ROE for 2022. Perfect. Thank you so much. Sure. Our next question is from Chiradeep Ghosh. Chiragh, please go ahead and ask your question. Just one second. Yeah. This is Chiragh Ghosh from SICO Bahrain. Thanks for the call. Two very quick question. The first one is, I just again want to get my understanding right. You are saying that The net non-performing loan was 4.3%, and after the recovery, it should have reduced to 3.2%, but you took a lot more conservative approach in the whole process, and that's why the NPL ratio went up to 4.7%. Just want to get us understanding that, what kind of loan are these? Are they a riskier loan, or are you even allowed to move a stage 2 to a stage 3? Just want to get a sense about this or if you just wanted to boost your provisioning, why didn't you boost the provisioning for the rest of it? I just want to understand the technical aspect of it. That is my first one. Second one is also in continuation of your loan book. Which are the sector which you'll be primary targeting? Would it primarily be public sector, as you have said in the past? Also, I saw that the loan-to-deposit have come down and which is, some analysts might find it good, but you said that you are comfortable with an even higher loan-to-deposit ratio. What would be the path ahead in that thing also? Okay. Yeah. Thanks, Chiro. Firstly, in terms of the provisioning and how that moves, of course, when you move accounts from stage 2 to stage 3, there is already typically an ECL against those names. That then moves from stage 2 to stage 3 into specific provisions. You'll see a reduction in ECL and an increase in the specific provisions when you move an account, staging-wise. Of course, the underlying ECL is still growing for the COVID schemes and generally for the lending book. That's why you see some movements between the ECL and the specific provisions. Yes, you're quite right. What we've mentioned earlier on is that there was a large recovery that would have meant that our NPL ratio would go down. We were not comfortable that that is the right signal at this moment in time. We saw accounts that needed to move to stage 3, and we moved them for the year-end. That's really around the provisioning. Just one second. Which are the sectors where you are seeing these concerns, where you decided to move? Yeah. These are some of the older loans. Typically, real estate is the main one. The area, that in which we find most of the provisioning that is required. In terms of your second question, where do we see loan growth? Yes, public sector government is our number one focus. Now that you're seeing more and more diversification in the economy and in the business, we expect to see increases across the board also. We're still managing down our percentage of real estate, and you can see that in our 2021 numbers as well. Loan-to-Deposit ratio, as we've always said, we do focus on the Basel ratios, NSFR, LCR. Those are compliant per requirements. LD ratio can be a little up, a little down. It's a secondary focus for us versus the Basel ratios. I think I would just add that part of that is our primary focus is on increasing our low-cost deposit base and as a percentage of our funding. That's now rising steadily from where it was, say, three years ago. I think it's gone up. Realistically, till what% do you believe you can take this to, Amit? We have a target of 50% of our deposits should be coming from low-cost deposits. I think it's currently 35, right? We've set ourselves the 1st target level of 50%. There's a steady work on that all the time. In a rising interest rate environment, do you think there will be a hindrance to this target from the ground reality? Actually, not really, because these low-cost deposits are really coming off transactional balances. I think they're less interested, sensitive in that sense. As long as you're providing the strong cash management and other capabilities around it. Yes, you will see some pressure for increases, but they're never to the same extent as a normal, say, deposit. I think that's the reason, because this is more about service and transaction. That's where it's your capability which matters. That's why we think that that is still sustainable. We're still winning more and more mandates from our clients, and that's why we still believe that that target of 50% is what we have to get to as a first step. Okay. That's all from my side. Thank you very much. Our next question is from Leah Al-Haj. Please go ahead and ask your question. Yes, hello. Thank you for taking my question. This is Leah Al-Haj from Bloomberg Intelligence Research. I just wanted to ask you, how many interest rate hikes do you have budgeted? And are these budgeted towards the beginning or the end of the year? And also, do you think the Central Bank of Qatar will follow the Fed and the number of hikes, even though inflation level could be lower in Qatar versus U.S.? Thank you. Thanks, Leah. Look, the budgeting looks at our overall Balance Sheet movements and the kind of business that we're focusing on, not so much individually, how many hikes there will be or will not be. That's a moving target always, with the Fed constantly updating with expectations and what the market expects. What we look at more is how our business is growing and what our net interest margins will look like. As I mentioned earlier, each quarter% hike results in about QAR 40 million increase in our net interest income. That's what we're really looking at, is how that will grow over the next year. I think the number of hikes is always changing, in terms of what the market expects. We don't really budget in that kind of way, that every quarter, how many hikes will there be or not be? I think we do it more around the net interest margin and the asset growth. It's very simplistic, I would say, and probably not as sophisticated as the model that you're referring to. I don't think we are at that stage, I'll be very frank. We do it quite simply. In terms of the Central Bank, actually, the Qatari rial is obviously pegged to the U.S. dollar. I think they would follow the U.S. dollar hikes. Otherwise, if you're out a step too long, then it affects your overall peg status. The question of timing, I'm not the governor. We have a new governor, so I think that's down to him. In the past, they have usually followed it, maybe with a little bit of a time lag, but they have generally followed, both on the upward and on the downward. I would say that's been my experience. Okay. Thank you. That was very helpful. Thank you. Our next question is from Aibek Islamov. Aibek, please go ahead and ask your question. Yes. Thank you for the conference call, as always. I wanted to ask you whether the Central Bank of Qatar provides guidance and recommendations on provision coverage that CBQ you have to follow as a bank? That's my first question. When the rates increase, what do you think will be response from your CASA deposits? If you look at the historical experience, what do you think could be the appreciation in the CASA deposit ratio in the event of higher interest rates? I just wanted to ask you, what do you think will happen to the income on your securities portfolio, realized gains and realized gains holding, when we have a fairly sort of quick, steep increase in 10-year U.S. yields? Thanks, Aibek. Your first question in terms of guidance from the Central Bank. I think the most important thing is that if we are moving an account out of one stage and into a lower stage, that requires Central Bank permission. If we thought a stage 3, for example, should now move to stage 2 or stage 2 to stage 1, that cannot be done without Central Bank's prior permission. That's probably the most important role that the Central Bank plays in terms of guidance for our staging. I kind of missed the second question, but I'll address the third question, which was on investment securities. Most of these, the impact of them is in our equity and reserves, not P&L. Of course, they can be negative and positive mark-to-markets, as a result of interest rate movements. Obviously with potentially interest rates going upwards, any purchases that we have in the past would have a negative impact on our overall equity and reserves. It is not through the P&L primarily. Aibek, would you mind just repeating the second question? I think it was something to do with deposits. I didn't quite catch it. The question was around the CASA deposit ratio. How will that change in a rising rate environment? Looking at your historical experience, what do you think will happen to your CASA deposit ratio? Will it go or will it remain different? Yeah. Of course, as we mentioned, Aybek, a lot of the low-cost deposits is really coming from our transaction banking. That is something where we are actually increasing our penetration. We are winning new mandates. We don't see those as particularly interest rate sensitive. We expect that low-cost deposit rise to continue. Yes, there may be some low-cost deposits currently in our books, which would be moving as a result of any significant interest rate moves. Our overall view is that low-cost deposits will continue to increase, even in an increasing rate environment, given the nature of how they are generated for the bank. Thank you. Hope that answers your questions. Thank you, Aybek. Our next question is from Lee Beswick. Please go ahead and ask your question. Thank you. CBQ has always carried a relatively high LDR. I think you're up at 120%-ish. If you look at the evolution of some of the other banks in Qatar, they've moved towards your level now, such that there's a relatively high gearing ratio for a lot of the banks and U.S. dollars are at a premium in Qatar today. Just wondering, given the U.S. dollar shortage within the banking system, is that something which can affect your funding going forward? Putting aside U.S. interest rate increases, I was wondering whether you'd be squeezed at all on the funding side, and that could affect NIMs in future. Yeah, Lee, thank you for that question. Let me take that. LD ratio, as you know, is a very simple ratio of just loans and deposits. It totally excludes all of our long-term funding liabilities that we built up. In Commercial Bank, that's actually quite a significant part of our liabilities. We focus more on NSFR and LCR, which are the Basel ratios, which truly show you the position of the bank. On both of those, we are compliant as far as ratio requirements are concerned. No, we don't really see that being an impact on our abilities and on our net interest margins. LD ratio is, as I said, a very simple formula. The NSFR and LCR really capture the situation much better. Okay, thanks. Sorry, just a follow-up on a different point. When is the loan forbearance due to end in Qatar? It was recently extended until March, so Q1 of this year. It is being done quarter by quarter, so we will see if it gets extended further beyond Q1. Okay. The provisions that you took sort of had that in mind, presumably, that at some point that will end. That was definitely one of the considerations, yes. Okay. Thank you. Sure. Our next question is from Waruna Kumarage. Please go ahead, Waruna, and ask your question. Hi, this is Waruna Kumarage from SICO, Bahrain. Thank you for the opportunity. I have only one question regarding Alternatifbank. When I look at the table which shows the summary balance sheet, I can see a sharp drop in equity to assets ratio in the fourth quarter. I was wondering whether you might require to raise capital as early as the first quarter. That's it. Thank you. First of all, thank you for the question. Actually, yes, it looks like, especially regarding the very high and aggressive TRY depreciation, we have seen that effect, but actually, especially the forbearance actions from the BRSA in Turkey, actually it is whole banking sector issue. Actually, we don't have any additional capital injection needs especially just now because I would like to remember that especially the average dollar TRY rate in last quarter was almost 16 TRY, now it is very stable and around 13.5 TRY, and we offset that impact actually. It was a very unique incident for last quarter. Now it is stabilizing and our total risk-graded assets actually are normalizing. Of course, our efforts in order to decrease the total FX loan is going to continue, and we are decreasing again the FX loans in total loan book. We can say that. Okay. Thank you. We have the next question from Edmond Christo. Edmond, please go ahead and ask a question. Edmond, can you please unmute and ask your question? Can you hear me now? Yes, we can hear you now. Hello. Okay. Thanks for the call today. I just want to follow up on the asset quality. There is write-off that when I look at the number, there is high write-off of around QAR 653 quarterly sequentially in Q4. My understanding, in Qatar it's hard to get approval for the write-off. Is this related to Turkey or it's a legacy real estate portfolio? The other thing I want to understand, when we look at the coverage ratio, stage 3, 2, and 1 for The Commercial Bank, you are not on the higher end. What's your aspirational level going into 1H? How confident are you going to see on the stage 3? It's very hard to see what is the collateral value against stage 3. If possible, to provide either collateral value or stage 3, including collateral value with some haircut, will be beneficial. Thank you. Yeah, let me take that, Edmond. The write-off you see is actually in Qatar, and that relates to that account that we mentioned during the provisions piece, that basically, we did have quite a large settlement, which included a write-off, and which would've reduced the NPL ratio quite significantly if new names had not been moved into stage 3 at the same time. That specific account that we were, it was a legacy real estate loan that was settled at the end of 2021. That specifically is the account that we were referring to. In terms of coverage, yes, of course, when you first move accounts from stage 2 to stage 3, you will see a reduction in coverage, especially as I mentioned, they're very well collateralized. You don't 100% provide for those, you provide according to a reduction in the collateral. We expect that coverage to start going up again during the course of 2022. These are some temporary ups and downs in terms of coverage ratio. I think you'll see that going upwards during 2022. In terms of collateral, of course, because of these kind of loans which are in the real estate sector, there is very good collateral of differing amounts, but typically 100% or over 100% covered. Yeah. I think one aspect to keep in mind is that the Qatar Central Bank is very conservative in how it treats collateral. As an example, if you have a loan for QAR 100, let's say, and you have real estate of, say, QAR 200. They ask you to take a 50% haircut on it, which means you get a collateral value of QAR 100. Even then, they don't allow you to take QAR 100. They ask you to take only 50% of the loan. It's a very conservative approach to real estate. In that sense, if you're to take, let's say, the provision and the collateral, I think we'd be well over 100% covered. Significant margin. If we include 50% of the collateral, your stage 3 coverage is at least 100%? That's correct. That's the way to look at it, Edmund. Yeah. Okay, perfect. If I can follow up on one other thing that I found is quite interesting in this earnings is the repayments. We don't talk about repayments. We talk about stronger public sector demand for credit. I do understand the higher spending ahead of the World Cup. Can you shed some light on what kind of project you see in the pipeline for the public sector? If you can just give me some clarity on what the health of the private sector as of now, and what's your expectation for the 1H in terms of the credit growth coming from the private sector. It's easy to think about it when the World Cup happened. Ahead of the World Cup, you will see credit growth coming from the private sector and businesses and business activity improving. What is the situation right now in 1H? Thank you. Yeah. Edmund, look, I think there are long-term projects that the government has laid out. They include Qatar Rail, expansion of the airport, Lusail City, expressways. Those are just the non-carbon projects that are out there. Of course, we know that there is the expansion in the gas fields as well. These are the big projects of the government going forward. What that means, of course, is that the private sector benefits as well, and a lot of these will spill through into the private sector. That's why we see a very optimistic view in terms of growth for the country well beyond the World Cup. I think most of the projects we will be involved in are not directly related to the World Cup. They are really indirect projects for improving the infrastructure of the country. This is happening this year? This is reflected this year in your guidance? Yeah. In 2022 and beyond, well beyond 2022 as well. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. Yeah. Our next question is from Janani. Janani please go ahead and ask your question. Thank you for the call. I have a couple of quick questions, if I may. My first one is around asset quality. Would you be able to share with us what% of your loan book is still on the deferred program? On the real estate portfolio, I think it's about 20% of your total loans is still in real estate, about 19%. What% of that is still underwritten under the old regime, like before you overhaul the underwriting regime? My second one is around FOL. Do you think you can give us any color on the timing and what further steps do you have to do? Also whether you could approve it at the AGM rather than an EGM with a normal AGM, which you'll convene after the full year results. Janani, in terms of, firstly, asset quality. Look, I think the real estate% are coming down. You can see that it's around 19%. Most of the real estate lending that we have is from you know, older than five years now in the book. Very little new real estate lending has been done. Not zero. There has been some. There are some which are government-led, so we would do those. Otherwise, we've obviously had that focus on government and public sector and out of real estate. That is the main area for our focus to move up on government and public sector and down on real estate. As far as FOL goes, that process is ongoing. We are expecting that, in the first half of this year, we will be able to complete that. Our AGM is in middle of March. Whether it is in time for that, I'm not sure. Joseph? Yes. We've certainly put it on the agenda, but it just depends on whether we get the go ahead from QCB in time to be able to table it. Certainly, as of now, we have made sure that it is part of the agenda for. Basically, the AGM will be followed straight by an EGM. It's for the 16th of March for us. If we get all the approvals, then we will move ahead with that. Thank you. That's very helpful, Rehan. Just to clarify, on the 16th of March itself, say the QCB approves, you'll be able to go ahead with the EGM and approve the 100% FOL? That's correct, Janani. Okay. Just to follow up, I'm not sure whether you can share the% with us, like what% of your book is still under deferred program, like that was extended end of December? Yeah, very little. I think it's two and a half%. Is this on your total loan book or is it just on your Qatari book? On the Qatari book. Okay, great. That is very helpful. Thank you. Thank you very much. Our next question, the last one, is from Waruna. A repeat question. Waruna, go ahead. Sorry, just a follow-up question to Rehan. I just want to clarify this, since you mentioned that the QAR 600 million write-off was related to the same account, which you could have moved from stage 3 to 2. Is it that part of it was written off and part was regularized? Is that how it happened? If you could explain that a little. That's correct, Varuna. Okay. Thank you. Sure. That's the end of our Q&A. I hand you over to Joseph for closing comments. Thank you very much. I think there were some very good, interesting, and insightful questions there. As always, we are available to answer any clarification that you may need. Please feel free to approach us, Rehan or his team, at any time. We look forward to seeing you at the next quarterly call. Let me also wish you, on behalf of our team, a Happy New Year. Rather belated, all the best, and stay safe. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.