The Kremlin's taxes from Western banks in the Russian Federation have quadrupled.
The largest Western banks that remained in Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine paid more than 800 million euros in taxes to the Kremlin in 2023. This is four times more than in the pre-war period.
The Financial Times writes about this.
The seven largest European banks by assets in Russia – Raiffeisen Bank International, UniCredit, ING, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo and OTP – reported a combined profit of more than 3 billion euro 2023.
These revenues were three times higher than in 2021, and were partly generated by funds that banks cannot withdraw from the country.
The jump in profitability has seen European banks pay around €800 million in taxes, up from €200 million in 2021, FT analysis shows. This was in addition to profits from US lenders such as Citigroup and JPMorgan.
Taxes paid by European banks are equivalent to about 0.4% of all expected non-energy budget revenues in Russia for 2024.
“Foreign creditors benefited not only from rising interest rates, but also from international sanctions against Russian banks. Such measures deprived their competitors of access to international payment systems and increased the attractiveness of Western banks for clients in the country,” journalists write.
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More than half of the tax payments of European banks go to the Austrian Raiffeisen Bank International, which has the largest presence in Russia among foreign lenders.
It became known earlier that one of the last channels available to Russians for withdrawing funds abroad is gradually ceasing to operate. Banks of foreign countries are en masse announcing their refusal to accept payments from the Russian Federation through the Unistream system, the operating bank of which came under US sanctions at the end of last week. This applies, in particular, to the countries of the former CIS.
