Sergei Ignatiev, the chairman of the Bank of Russia, has praised Russia's ousted finance minister Alexei Kudrin following a public bust-up with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev over the state of public finances that led to Kudrin's departure.

Reuters, a newswire, reported Ignatiev on Wednesday as saying Kudrin was a "very strong" finance minister and that he had done a great deal for his country in the nine-and-a-half years he worked with him.

Ignatiev became head of the Russian central bank in