The Hong Kong bank HSBC has refused a Russian IT company from Ukraine's sanctions list to pay under a contract with a foreign partner, Vedomosti writes , citing a source in the company. The bank explained its decision by the position of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, which was published in the Dow Jones compliance database.
Also, according to Vedomosti, the Croc IT integrator and the electronics distributor OCS Distribution (both companies are under Ukrainian sanctions) faced similar problems: they were denied service by “several foreign banks”.
In mid-April, Vladimir Zelensky imposed sanctions against the largest Russian IT companies. Among them, in particular, were Yandex, VK, Rambler, Skillbox and Skyeng. In total, more than 400 individuals and 241 companies associated with Russia were included in the list.
Sanctions experts note that for large foreign banks it makes no difference which country the company is on the sanctions list; when checking a client, banks rely on data from compliance databases, such as Dow Jones.