Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree that prohibits any transactions with the shares of 45 banks, which are owned by foreign owners from "unfriendly" countries. The Decree is published on the portal of legal information and comes into force from the moment of publication.
The document concerns subsidiaries of foreign banks, financial institutions and large foreign companies. At the same time, the list includes a number of backbone banks of the Russian financial system – Raiffeisenbank and UniCreditBank. The document also affects the activities of such large financial corporations as: Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, UBS, HSBC, Western Union, PayPal, American Express, Credit Agricole, BNP Paribas, ING, Deutsche Bank.
In addition to financial companies, the list included subsidiaries of large automobile concerns, which act as intermediaries in concluding leasing and loan contracts. In part, this ban may make life difficult for some companies that have already announced they are leaving the Russian market – we are talking about Toyota and Mercedes, which have informed about deals to sell their assets in Russia. In addition to Toyota and Mercedes, the list included MS Bank Rus (Mitsubishi), RN-Bank (a joint structure of UniCredit and Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi) and BMW Bank (indirectly controlled by BMW Group).
It is noteworthy that the Hungarian OTP Group, which owns a bank of the same name in Russia, also made it to the list. Representatives of the European company claimed that it was repeatedly pressured to leave the Russian market, now the company will not be able to do this without special permission from the government commission. Some foreign banks managed to leave before the introduction of such restrictions, for example, the French group Societe Generale acted, which sold Rosbank to the Interros group of Vladimir Potanin in the spring, and the Czech companies PPF Group and Home Credit Group, which sold their subsidiary – the bank " Home Credit.
Getting rid of assets in Russia has become impossible since July 2022, when the authorities announced that this would be a response to sanctions against Russian financial institutions that had lost the opportunity to “normally conduct business abroad.” Later, in August, Vladimir Putin secured a ban on transactions with shares in subsidiaries of foreign banks until the end of 2022. The new decree introduces an indefinite ban. Similar restrictions apply to energy companies, which are prohibited from selling Russian assets without special permission.