A top commercial banker in the United Arab Emirates has urged the central bank to cut some of its reserve requirements sharply in order to spur corporate lending.

"What we are asking for now is to provide greater liquidity and release reserve funds...which the banks can use," Abdul Aziz Al-Ghurair, chief executive of Mashreq bank, was quoted by Monday’s Al Bayan newspaper as saying. Mashreq confirmed his comments to Reuters.

Ghurair suggested cash reserve requirements imposed by the central bank on banks’ current accounts be slashed to just 1 percent from 14 percent to free more funds for lending. Reserve requirements for time deposits are already at that level.

The banker, who also chairs the Emirates Banks Association and the Dubai International Financial Centre Authority, the governing body of Dubai’s offshore financial district, said this would provide the banking sector with additional liquidity of up to AED20 billion ($ 5.5 billion). Analysts said the central bank was unlikely to agree to any cut in reserve requirements for the foreseeable future, particularly since the existing amount of funds in the banking system seemed ample. Ghurair himself said there were AED268 billion worth of liquidity looking for lending opportunities in the UAE at the end of 2011.

“Right now, the liquidity in the banking sector is better than it used to be. So I would not expect them to change the reserve requirement at this particular time,” said Giyas Gokkent, chief economist at National Bank of Abu Dhabi.

“They did not do it at the height of the crisis in the last quarter of 2008,” he added.

In late March, central bank governor Sultan Nasser Al-Suweidi, asked by reporters about the possibility of shifts in monetary policy, said current policy was good and that he was happy with growth in bank lending. “Bank lending is going at a reasonable rate...under the circumstances,” he said.

Banks’ provisions against bad loans rose to a record high of AED59.1 billion in March, up 27 percent from a year ago, and the International Monetary Fund has predicted the asset quality of UAE banks will deteriorate in 2012.

In response to such risks, the central bank has introduced new caps on loans to local governments and their entities, and Suweidi has called on banks to manage real estate-related risks better. So any policy that might encourage indiscriminate lending appears unlikely.

However, bank lending growth in the UAE, the second largest Arab economy, has stayed in the low single digits since Dubai’s 2009 corporate debt crisis, even though the real economy has recovered smartly since then. Lending growth was just 2.5 percent year-on-year in March, a three-month high.