Aug 2
Belgium freezes 50 billion euros in Russian funds
This is a surprisingly high amount: three weeks ago, 13.8 billion euros in assets had been frozen across the EU. Now the amount frozen by Belgium alone is considerably higher.
These are cash and stocks located in Belgium owned by 1,229 people and 110 entities subject to sanctions against Russia. These are Russian politicians, oligarchs, banks and corporations.
The latest sanction packages have added several banks to the list, such as Sberbank, the largest Russian bank, and VTB Bank, one of the largest banks in Russia with the state as the largest shareholder.
In addition, as an important international financial hub, Belgium with institutions such as the securities giant Euroclear in Brussels, has blocked 217.1 billion euros in transactions that have been banned since the full-scale war in Ukraine.
Francis Adyns, the spokesman for the FPS Finance, says he is not allowed to clarify which sanctioned persons or companies have the largest amounts frozen. “All we can say about that is that in the latest wave of sanctions we have found names that have had large sums of assets frozen.” The last time Belgium published figures on this, in April, it was 3.5 billion euros. Adyns says that no real estate has yet been targeted in Belgium under the financial sanctions
https://www.demorgen.be/snelnieuws/belgie-bevriest-50-miljard-euro-aan-russische-fondsen~b47b2328/
I hope it will be used for Ukrainian reparations but I doubt it will. Would require the EU to grow a pair of balls.
Belgium is a very wealthy country. They could do something great for once in their history; pay the €50bn directly into Zel’s army fund from their own cash reserves, while they go through the lengthy formalities of seizing the cash from the kremkrapper accounts.
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