Russia is open to dialogue if Western countries are ready to discuss the mutual exchange of frozen assets. This was stated by the Director of the Department of Economic Cooperation of the Russian Foreign Ministry Dmitry Birichevsky.
He added that Moscow is ready for any development of the situation, but the mutual exchange scheme proposed by the Russian Federation could be of interest to Western counterparties whose funds are in Russian jurisdiction in “C” type accounts.
“As everyone knows, ‘it takes two to tango’… If the other side is ready for dialogue, we are open to it,” the diplomat emphasized, as quoted by RIA Novosti.
At the same time, Biricheskiy admitted that the signals coming from the United States and Europe can hardly be called optimistic. In the West, in his opinion, they continue to try to create a legal basis for the withdrawal of investment profits from Russian frozen assets.
Earlier, the President of the Russian Federation signed a decree on launching the process of exchanging blocked assets worth up to 100 thousand rubles. As a result, $3 billion of Russians’ investments in foreign securities were frozen.
The day before, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov noted that the Russian Federation also has “frozen accounts” of foreigners. Assets are held in so-called “C” accounts. “These are our obligations on securities, dividends, those that constitute our obligations to foreign counterparties from unfriendly countries,” the minister pointed out. He added that the value of assets in type “C” accounts is “not small numbers.” We are talking about payments in rubles on federal loan bonds to investors from unfriendly countries, payments on Russian securities to non-residents.
According to RBC, up to 1 trillion rubles could have accumulated in type “C” accounts at the National Settlement Depository by mid-March 2023. dividends and coupons.
Source: Rosbalt
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