The West does not want to transfer Russian assets to Ukraine, it thinks how to expropriate them. On February 15, Izvestia was told about this by Alexei Chepa, First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs.
In this way, he reacted to information that the Swiss Ministry of Justice and Police said that the confiscation of private Russian assets would be contrary to the country’s Constitution and the current legal order.
“The West would have come up with something long ago to legalize the so-called transfer. In fact, no one wants to hand over anything to anyone, they are thinking how to expropriate it,” Chepa said.
The deputy said that 10 years ago he saw a “proposal of the banking system in Europe”, according to which it was planned to expropriate the money of Russian and Chinese entrepreneurs stored in Europe.
“They came up with legal loopholes to steal this money. They were going, for example, to force entrepreneurs to present 10-year declarations to banks, which our entrepreneurs did not have. So they had to freeze funds for many years,” he added.
At the same time, the parliamentarian noted that the statements of the Swiss side indicate that such actions will destroy the entire financial and economic system built in the West.
Chepa also pointed out that Swiss banks are no longer independent and reliable.
“The Americans impudently fined both Swiss banks and any banks if someone somehow dared to violate certain rules that they themselves had established. The United States interfered in the internal affairs of any banks. It is unlikely that lawyers will be able to come up with justifications for such illegal actions, but the law is not written for them, ”he concluded.
Earlier, on February 9, the European Commission announced that the European Union had not yet made a final decision on the confiscation of Russian assets. However, they stressed that the EU and its high-ranking representatives are confident that “Russia will have to pay for all the destruction.” They also noted that the EU is currently exploring ways to use frozen or confiscated Russian assets for this purpose.
A day earlier, Russian Senator Grigory Karasin, in a conversation with Izvestia, called the possible use of Russia’s frozen assets as economic banditry. He recalled that in Brussels they forget that Russia protects people from radical socialism and takes care of its own strategic security against the backdrop of NATO expansion to the east.
The European Union froze the assets of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation for €300 billion, as well as about €19 billion owned by Russian businessmen.
Western countries began to impose sanctions in response to Russia’s conduct of a special operation in the Donbass. Soon the European Union approved the decision to freeze the assets of the Central Bank.