Many EU countries have barely frozen Russian assets | Financial

“There are six Member States doing the work,” he said. “We have a situation where some Member States give us a lot of information, others give us information about very low amounts” and “it gets more complicated when certain countries don’t communicate.”

According to Reynders, Germany, France, Ireland, Austria, Belgium and Luxembourg account for €12.7 billion of the €13.9 billion that has now been frozen in the European Union, while the EU has 27 Member States. The Belgian believes that other countries should do more to secure Russian money.

Unclear about the Netherlands

Not so long ago, De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) announced that banks in the Netherlands had frozen or withheld €1.2 billion in Russian assets until mid-June. But it is not entirely clear how those figures relate to the amounts Reynders mentions. In Germany, Finance Minister Christian Lindner said in June that nearly €4.5 billion had been frozen in his country

REPO, a special working group working on sanctions for the countries, calculated at the end of last month that more than $330 billion in financial resources had already been secured worldwide. It would be $30 billion in funds from oligarchs and $300 billion from the central bank in Moscow. Several luxury yachts and other possessions have also been seized.

—