April 27, 2024
Today at
15:01
Our country blocks tens of billions in money and other financial assets from sanctioned Russians and companies. “The blockage is problematic but we continue to work on this,” Moscow said in a press briefing on Saturday.
In Belgium, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tens if not hundreds of billions of euros in funds belonging to people, companies and other legal entities against whom financial sanctions have been imposed have been frozen. Frozen Russian assets are significantly higher in Belgium than in any other Member State, largely a result of financial institutions such as the securities giant Euroclear in Brussels that have stopped billions in transactions that have been banned since the war in Ukraine.
Belgium’s refusal to ease the blockage and swap assets with Russia was a point of focus during a Russian government press briefing on Saturday, the Russian news agency Interfax reported.
“The Belgian government’s refusal to exchange frozen assets with Russia is causing problems in the process (to free Western assets, ed.),” said press secretary Dmitry Peskov. ‘This complicates the situation and makes the implementation of our plan more difficult. But we will continue our work.”
There are indications that our country owns as much as 170 billion euros in underlying immobilized assets, about half of the estimated total in Western countries.
It is expected that in 2024, Belgium will levy more than approximately 1.1 billion in corporate taxes on the profits from immobilized Russian assets held by Euroclear. This is increasingly causing bad blood among Ukraine and Western allies, Politico revealed last week. “None of it goes to the treasury,” an anonymous government official told the political magazine. ’49 percent of the proceeds go to military equipment, the rest to the reception of Ukrainian refugees, humanitarian and medical aid, and aid in reconstruction’.
