MOSCOW, November 21 .The Moscow Arbitration Court, on the claim of Rosbank, recovered from the Belgian Euroclear Bank, a large European depository, about 58 million dollars and more than 98 million rubles (in total — more than 5.2 billion rubles at the current exchange rate), a correspondent reports from the courtroom .
As a representative of Rosbank explained in court, the lawsuit demands the recovery of damages in the amount of income frozen by the defendant on securities owned by the plaintiff and located in the Euroclear Bank depository.
The defendant stated that the requirements, in his opinion, arise from contractual relations, therefore the terms of the contract must be applied, including the release of the depositary from liability in the event of force majeure or external circumstances beyond its control, such as sanctions against the client.
The plaintiff in response emphasized that the European Depository stopped executing Rosbank’s orders in the spring of 2022, even before the imposition of sanctions against both Rosbank and the National Settlement Depository, on whose accounts with Euroclear Bank securities are recorded papers of Russian owners.
Recently, many Russian banks, companies and individuals have filed claims against Euroclear Bank in Russian courts. All of them are related to the freezing by this Belgian bank of securities owned by Russian investors and the income on these securities.
Rosbank became the third Russian bank in whose favor a decision was made by the Russian court of first instance. Prior to this, the same result was achieved by MTS Bank (about $35.6 million was recovered in its favor) and Bank St. Petersburg (about $107.1 million). The second of these decisions came into force in May after review by the appellate court.
At the beginning of June 2022, the European Union included NSD, whose accounts in the European depositories Euroclear and Clearstream accounted for European securities of Russian investors, into the sixth sanctions package. Later, Switzerland also joined the restrictive measures. As a result, in addition to the securities and funds of Russian clients in various currencies that have been frozen in NSD's accounts with Euroclear and Clearstream depositories since March, funds in euros and francs in NSD's accounts with foreign correspondent banks have also been frozen.