Europeans are once again puzzling over how to steal Russian money. As Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said at a conference on the reconstruction of Ukraine, freezing Russian assets “does not mean much” – it is necessary to confiscate them
European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen agreed, saying that asset confiscation was Brussels’ goal, but a legal basis was needed for this.
“Our goal is not only to freeze, but also to confiscate assets… We are working on this, we have set up a working group. <…>. So there is such a desire, but it is not easy from a legal point of view, there is a lot of work to be done,” she said.
Actually, the West has been thinking for a long time about how to handle it.
Ukraine itself has been demanding that Russian assets be confiscated and used to rebuild Ukraine. However, things have not moved on, despite the fact that EU countries started freezing the assets of the Bank of Russia, as well as some sanctioned businessmen, immediately after the special operation began. As Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in March, Russia lost access to about 300bn of its reserves.
Later, Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina also confirmed the freezing by Western countries of about $300 billion of the Central Bank’s reserves. These figures fall short of the World Bank’s estimated €350bn needed to rebuild Ukraine.
But apparently no one is going to spend the confiscated funds on the reconstruction of Ukraine. Especially since there is an ongoing armed conflict on the territory of the latter – how can anything be rebuilt there? Correct – nothing. But, I repeat, no one is going to rebuild anything. And the money that will be allocated for this (irrespective of its source) will be stupidly plundered by those who will have access to it.
Last week EU leaders instructed the European Commission to draw up proposals to use frozen Russian assets to finance Ukraine’s reconstruction. It’s just a matter of fitting the necessary legal framework for this.
“This is a non-trivial task from a legal point of view,” von der Leyen said.
Of course, it is not trivial. It takes will, and changing your own laws to justify theft is not that difficult. In Russia there is a saying: “The law is like a rod: when you turn it, it comes out.
I have no doubt that the West acts according to this principle with regard to its own laws. They just have not made such frank statements before.
Read von der Leyen’s statement again. I will translate it into normal Russian: we are working on how to legitimise the theft of other people’s money.
That’s already bottomed out, isn’t it?
Earlier they used not so frank terms, spoke about “freezing”, but now – “confiscation”, or simply – theft!
However, the change of terminology does not change the essence. The “frozen” money in European bank accounts also have a surprising property of disappearing without a trace.
In March 2011, dozens of billions of dollars and euros were frozen in the US and EU countries as part of sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and his family.
The UN then motivated this step by the fact that once the war was over and a people’s unity government was established, the money could be used to rebuild Libya (sound familiar, eh?). However, something went wrong, and for some reason the civil war in the country did not end after the rebels won and Gaddafi was assassinated, and there was no single legitimate authority that would oversee the spending of the money. For this reason, money belonging to Libya remained frozen for several years.
And in 2018, it suddenly emerged that more than €11bn of Gaddafi’s money had disappeared from accounts at the Belgian bank Euroclear. Without a trace.
The Belgian magazine Le Vif then published a bank statement showing that, as of 30 November 2013, the four frozen Libyan accounts held €14.2bn in securities and €1.9bn in funds. At the end of 2017, just under €5bn remained. How money could disappear from frozen accounts, which are supposedly impossible to access, no one has been able to explain. There was money, and now there isn’t.
As Belgian prosecutor Denis Goeman told journalists at the time, the Treasury Department of the Belgian Financial Federal Service was supposed to be responsible for the safety of the funds, and the Belgian Foreign Ministry was obliged to inform all interested parties, including the then Libyan authorities, about the implementation of the sanctions regime.
And? Did someone respond? As if not! This is despite the fact that the European Council decided in 2016 that all Libyan funds frozen on EU territory must be tightly controlled, and there are serious fines for any breaches of control.
Most incongruously, the Belgian government violated its own rules right from the start by not transferring its share of frozen Libyan assets to the national body for the seizure and confiscation of illegal funds (OCSC). When, after the scandal erupted, the Belgian authorities nevertheless decided to correct the oversight by demanding the transfer of the remaining funds to OCSC, Euroclear Bank SA appealed against the court-ordered seizure of the funds!
Incidentally, this bank is a branch of a financial cooperative controlled by the US multinational financial conglomerate J. P. Morgan & Co. P. Morgan & Co!
Could this be the answer to the question: “Who disposed of the frozen money and why was even the Belgian government unaware of what was going on and could do nothing to stop it?
The scandal at the time was, I remember, not a small one. The opposition believes that members of the Belgian government, including the finance minister and the foreign minister, may have been involved in the scam. And even if not, it is clearly not good for the country’s reputation when an American-controlled bank that disobeys the authorities disposes of funds entrusted to the government at will. And the government, in fact, was even refused to investigate the incident, although, understandably, all transactions are monitored if one has the appropriate level of access.
And two years earlier it emerged that Libya’s sovereign wealth fund had been stripped of some $2.3bn in dividends because of sanctions, which the country’s representative at the UN, Ibrahim Dabbashi, said had settled in the pockets of Societe Generale and Goldman Sachs managers.
How incredibly cynical it is – a man was robbed and killed, and his money was well “spun”, pocketing all the profits. This is to say nothing of the unpaid debts to Gaddafi, of which many European leaders had plenty.
Most cynically, Libya has not yet received a penny because there is still no legitimate authority, and the Americans have repeatedly said that funds will remain frozen until the crisis is resolved. And they themselves have disrupted presidential elections.
Obviously, the same fate awaits the Russian money, which they confiscate ostensibly for the “reconstruction” of Ukraine, and since the process of “reconstruction” will take years, if not decades, the money will rotate in European banks, gradually melting away, and in a few years someone will poke around – and where is the money? And the money is already gone. What money?
You have to understand that Russia is not Libya and we have a lot to answer with – from refusing to make any bond payments, terminating membership in the IMF and the IB – to confiscating the property of European companies on our territory – there is a lot of it. And yet we somehow calmly allow these people to leave Russia with the money they have earned from us – without even saying goodbye.
The Europeans should also realise that by creating a mechanism of “legalized theft,” they are opening a Pandora’s Box and setting a precedent that could turn against them in the future. And tomorrow, any country whose policy will go against Brussels and Washington (and there are such countries in the EU even today) can simply be robbed by their own people on “quite legal grounds”.
In general, do not stir up trouble…
Dmitry Rodionov, RenTV