Ukraine central bank intervention appears to stabilize currency

KIEV (Reuters) - Ukraine's central bank sold dollars on Thursday for the same price it had paid for them the previous day, action that appeared to help stabilize its hryvnia currency somewhat after dramatic falls earlier in the week. The dollar sales came after the bank abruptly lifted a one-day ban on nearly all commercial foreign exchange trading, which it had imposed just as suddenly on Wednesday morning. The central bank said it sold $81.89 million at a rate of 28.046 hryvnia to the dollar on Thursday. It had bought $80 million at the same rate during Wednesday's ban, which prohibited trading by banks for their clients and which it subsequently lifted after having said it would be in place for the rest of the week. The repeated unexpected moves by the bank have sown confusion in the currency markets. Wednesday's ban on trading had drawn a rebuke from Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk. The scarcity of commercial trading on Wednesday made it difficult to speak of a day-to-day rise or fall. But trades registered on the central bank's website took place on Thursday at an average rate of 30.173, making the hryvnia 4.8 percent stronger than on Tuesday, the last day of unrestricted trade. Several bank traders, speaking on condition of anonymity required by their employers, said the currency had been trading at a rate between 32 and 34 before the central bank jumped in with its offer to sell dollars, boosting the hryvnia. The hryvnia, one of the worst-performing currencies in the world, has shed half its value over the course of this year after halving during the whole of 2014. (Reporting by Natalia Zinets; Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Toby Chopra and Robin Pomeroy)