Confiscating frozen Russian bank assets in EU against law but possible

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Christian Wigand, European Commission spokesperson for justice on Thursday said confiscating frozen assets of the Central Bank of Russia in EU would violate the rule of law but  still possible.

Wigand told reporters that “as regards to the public assets, the assets immobilised from the Russia Central Bank we have communicated about this and discussions are going in the direction where the idea is rather to basically work with these assets and then use to proceed from it.

“Because again, we have to respect the rule of law obviously and we cannot just confiscate such assets but according to our legal opinion, it is possible to work with these assets that are immobilised.’’

Wigand also said that the amount of private Russian assets frozen by the EU had exceeded 24.1 billion euros (26.4 billion dollars).

“We have at this stage,  assets frozen in the EU worth around 24.1 billion euros from either private persons or entities that are listed under the EU sanctions.’’

The spokesman said that the personal assets were also liable to being frozen but were beyond confiscation saying “there is not a legal basis for this.’’

After the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, Western countries had imposed a number of tough sanctions on Russia, including the freezing of nearly half of the country’s foreign currency reserves about 300 billion dollars.

(Sputnik/NAN)