A St. Petersburg arbitration court has ordered the freezing of assets belonging to several banks in Russia, including Deutsche Bank. The order was issued at the request of RusChimAllianz, a subsidiary of Gazprom that operates an LNG terminal on the Baltic Sea. The company is making claims against Deutsche Bank for 238.61 million euros.
The assets were blocked in various forms, including securities held by Deutsche Bank and other companies with its participation, real estate, and money in accounts. However, it is only part of the bank’s assets in Russia.
The court had previously frozen bank accounts and assets of Italian bank Unicredit in Russia as well. Other donors are also affected by this decision. The background to this is the collapsed construction of the terminal due to Western sanctions, for which the banks had helped guarantee. RusChimAllianz is seeking 444 million euros from Unicredit, and assets worth 463 million euros have been frozen.
Bank Austria’s parent company Unicredit is one of the largest active foreign banks in Russia after Raiffeisenbank and is one of the 20 largest banks in the country based on its balance sheet assets. In 2021, RusChimAllianz signed a contract with German industrial group Linde and construction company Renaissance Heavy Industries to build the plant. RusChimAllianz paid Linde an advance for this project, but after the war of aggression against Ukraine launched by Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin, Western sanctions were imposed on Russia. According to reports, Linde informed its client that work on the project had stopped because of these sanctions. The banks that guaranteed the deal withdrew their guarantees due to these sanctions as well. Apart from Deutsche Bank and Unicredit, Commerzbank, Bayerische Landesbank, and Landesbank Baden-Württemberg were also sued before the arbitration court in St
