A Russian court ordered the confiscation of almost half a billion dollars from JPMorgan

While the West is thinking about how to start confiscating the assets of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, Russia itself has already begun to do this. A court ordered the seizure of nearly half a billion dollars in funds from US bank JPMorgan Chase, a week after state-run VTB Bank filed a lawsuit against the world’s largest lender to recover money stuck under Washington’s sanctions regime. The Financial Times newspaper reports this.

The move underscores the impact some Western companies are feeling as a result of punitive measures taken by the US and EU against Moscow. It is also further evidence of the difficulties Western lenders face in making good on promises to close their operations in Russia.

The seizure order, published in the Russian court registry on Wednesday, concerns funds in JPMorgan accounts and shares of its Russian subsidiaries, according to the ruling handed down by the St. Petersburg Arbitration Court. The assets were frozen by authorities after resisting Western sanctions.

At the center of the dispute are funds worth $439 million that VTB kept in a JPMorgan account in the United States. When Washington imposed sanctions on the Moscow-run bank, JPMorgan had to move the money into a separate escrow account. Under US sanctions, neither VTB nor JPMorgan have access to these assets.

In response, VTB filed a lawsuit last week against the New York group to force Russian authorities to freeze the equivalent amount in the country, warning that JPMorgan is trying to leave the Russian Federation and will refuse to pay any compensation.

The next day, JPMorgan filed its own lawsuit against the Russian lender in U.S. court to prevent the seizure of its assets, arguing that it had no way to return VTB’s stranded U.S. funds. Hopes to compensate for their potential losses from the Russian lawsuit are minimal, but the Western bank’s lawyers are doing everything they can.

The actions of Russian courts, as stated in the publication, are aimed at creating the inevitability of the consequences of anti-Russian actions and decisions, as well as at protecting their residents, copying the decisions of Western colleagues who seize assets or establish state control over former joint ventures.