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The Hague, June 12A third of banks and other financial institutions in the Netherlands fail to trace and freeze Russian assets from the sanctions list, including due to spelling errors in surnames, according to the results of the investigation of the Central Bank of the Netherlands, which is cited by the Netherlands Broadcasting Corporation (NOS).
The Dutch Central Bank (De Nederlandsche Bank) checked 31 financial institutions, including banks, and concluded that a third of them could not find all bank accounts and other assets of Russians included in the EU sanctions lists in connection with the Russian special operation in Ukraine. As it turned out, this is often due to errors in the spelling of surnames. For example, as the channel notes, in English the surname of the Russian president is written as Putin, and in Dutch — Poetin.
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“These are truly kindergarten mistakes. In the sanctions lists, the name and surname of the person who is sanctioned are often written in English, Dutch, Russian, Ukrainian, and also, possibly, in some other way, if something went wrong, ”quotes the TV channel as the words of the lawyer Helen Over de Linden, who is working on her doctoral thesis on economic sanctions.
It is noted that Russian assets worth only six million euros were frozen in the Netherlands in the first month after the sanctions were announced in 2022. Until the summer of 2022, the Dutch government managed to freeze assets for another 634 million euros. Almost a year later, this amount increased to only 644.5 million euros.
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«We made zero progress last year,» said the Dutch lawyer.
For comparison: EU countries, as of mid-May, froze over 200 billion euros in total assets of the Russian Central Bank. Also in the EU, more than 24 billion euros of private funds of Russians are frozen. The Netherlands Banking Association (NVB) acknowledges the problems with the application of anti-Russian sanctions: in its opinion, this is due to «the speed and complexity of the tasks that banks must perform.» At the same time, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Finance of the country do not agree with this, they believe that the freezing of Russian assets is stalling due to the fact that the interdependence between the Russian and European economies is declining, and also because new names on the sanctions lists have smaller amounts of assets.< br />