US imposes sanctions on entities involved in Raiffeisen’s aborted Oleg Deripaska deal

The US has imposed sanctions on three entities and an individual involved in an asset-swap deal Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank International has recently aborted.

Washington said the targeted parties had been involved in an “attempted sanctions evasion scheme” connected to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. It did not name Raiffeisen.

The Vienna-based lender last week announced it was “walking away” from a planned deal to acquire a 25 per cent stake in the Austrian construction company Strabag once held by Deripaska — in exchange for assets of the bank in Russia — because it had not been able to “obtain the required comfort” from regulators to proceed with the transaction.

Raiffeisen had previously said the deal was compliant with EU and US sanctions regimes and did not involve dealing with Deripaska. The US first imposed sanctions on the Russian businessman in 2018.

The bank had said it was transacting with Russian companies that were not connected to the oligarch and had legitimately acquired his stake in Strabag separately.

The US Treasury on Tuesday placed the three companies in question, and one individual involved with them, Dmitrii Beloglazov, on its sanctions list.

The US state department said: “The United States is today designating one Russian individual and three Russia-based companies involved in an attempted sanctions evasion scheme connected to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.”

The US Treasury said the “opaque and complex supposed divestment could have unfrozen more than $1.5bn worth of shares belonging” to Deripaska.

Raiffeisen declined to comment.

The bank has come under mounting pressure over its business in Russia — and various attempts to try to repatriate assets there. As other western lenders have pulled out of the country, it has continued to grow, becoming a relative safe haven for Russian depositors.

Despite shrinking its Russian loan book, huge spreads between deposits and central bank rates mean Raiffeisen continues to rake in big profits. Its division in the country has, for the past three years, made more money than the rest of all the bank’s other subsidiaries combined. This has led the group to pay more taxes to Russia’s government.

Kremlin-imposed capital controls mean the bank can neither send assets back to Austria, nor sell its Russian business easily. Raiffeisen has explored asset-swap transactions before. In March 2023 the bank weighed a €400mn deal with Russia’s Sberbank, which also failed to come to fruition.

Investors have grown concerned about the possibility of a regulatory crackdown against Raiffeisen, as western governments look to turn the economic screws on Moscow.

The bank’s planned AT1 bond issue was pulled last year amid investor concerns over its Strabag deal.

The lender last month disclosed the European Central Bank had ordered it to speed up efforts to shrink its portfolio in Russia, ordering even deeper cuts to lending there. The requirement would make efforts to try to sell its Russian division almost impossible, Raiffeisen warned.