US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urged German bank executives to step up efforts to comply with sanctions against Russia and stop trying to circumvent them. During a meeting with representatives of the banking sector in Frankfurt, she warned that banks that do not comply with the sanctions may themselves be subject to secondary US sanctions, which will cut off their access to the dollar.
He writes about it Reuters.
Yellen stressed the importance of preventing Russia from trying to obtain critical goods from advanced economies and stressed the need to remain vigilant to prevent the Kremlin from supplying its defense industrial base.
According to the minister, violators most often try to bypass sanctions through China, the UAE and Turkey. The US Treasury will continue to crack down on sanctions evasion, including in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Europe.
Yellen’s warning came against the background of the fact that some Western banks, in particular the German Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, are in no hurry to leave the Russian market. In 2023, the largest Western banks that remained in Russia paid more than €800 million in taxes there, which is four times more than in the pre-war period.
The seven largest European banks by the size of assets in the Russian Federation reported a combined profit of more than €3 billion in 2023, generated in part by funds that the banks cannot withdraw from the country.
Earlier, the US Treasury Department managed to get the Austrian Raiffeisen Bank, the largest Western bank in Russia, to withdraw from an agreement to buy an industrial stake linked to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
