Saudi Arabia's central bank is not interested in buying distressed or speculative assets such as troubled European debt and gold and the Opec member's banks are well positioned to withstand the euro zone crisis, its head said.

Saudi Arabia is a major holder of dollar assets as its riyal currency is pegged to the greenback and crude accounts for 85 per cent of its budget revenue.

Asked if the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency had considered buying European sovereign bonds such as Italian ones, governor Muhammad Al Jasser said: 'We do not buy specific bonds at all. We have not done it.'

'We always have a much more integrated reserve investment strategy which looks at it in a continuous and dynamic way that values security, safety and liquidity and therefore we do not look opportunistically at distressed assets or special assets that come up one way or the other,' Al Jasser said after a G20 meeting in Paris.

Saudi Arabia is the only Middle Eastern member of the G20 group of developed and emerging economies.

Gold, which has tumbled from a record high of above $1,920 an ounce, is another asset of little interest to the Saudi central bank due to its volatility, Al Jasser said.

'We have gold in our reserves but we have not bought and we have not sold it in a very long time. It has become a very speculative asset and we do not get into any speculative assets,' he said.

Asked whether the central bank was going to stick to this strategy, Al Jasser said: 'Yes'.

Al Jasser also said US Treasuries continued to be 'an important safe haven and major asset' in global financial markets.

'Our 62 per cent of global reserves are still in US assets. It is safe to say they are there to stay for a while,' he said.

Al Jasser also said banks in Saudi Arabia were well positioned to deal with any upcoming shocks as well as the European debt crisis. Capital adequacy for banks was north of 17 per cent with most of it Tier 1 capital.

'Our economy is doing very well and is expected to continue next year. This year, I have forecast that we will have at least 5pc growth and probably something close to that next year,' he said.

Analysts expected the $447 billion Saudi economy to expand by 6.5 per cent this year and 4.5 per cent in 2012 helped by an estimated $130 billion boost in social spending, or nearly 30 per cent of GDP.-Reuters