The Shanghai subsidiary of VTB and small border Chinese banks, through which Russia and China were going to make payments without unnecessary delays, limited the conversion of rubles into yuan. This is reported by The Moscow Times.
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These regional banks are ready to service trade with the Russian Federation, because they are not afraid of US sanctions: they do not work with dollars. The other side of the coin: they don’t need rubles either.
Therefore, they convert rubles into yuan no more than what goes into their accounts of Russian exporting clients for transfer to Russia.
These flows are not balanced: Russian exporters are predominantly large and use the services of other banks. Therefore, there are not enough “Russian” yuan, and importers have to wait a long time for the window for conversion in order to pay for the goods, said clients of several Chinese banks, including the daughter of VTB, which came under sanctions a month ago.
That’s when the problem arose, say three importers who encountered it. After VTB Shanghai fell under blocking US sanctions, its ability to convert rubles into yuan was sharply reduced. Much fewer export flows pass through small border banks than imports, a queue is created to receive yuan in China, the VTB Shanghai client reports explanations received from the bank manager.
In July, the same thing began in the branches of small border banks rural banks, say two senders of funds from Russia. In both cases, payments were previously made quickly, but now they are stuck.
“The bank explained to us that they see the payment, but cannot credit it to the recipient because they do not have enough requests from China for payment to Russia in rubles so that they can give yuan to our supplier,” said one interlocutor.
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VTB cannot buy yuan in China for sanctions reasons, and rural banks do not want to do this so that in transfers from Russia they do not carry out a full cross-border conversion of funds, explains the head of the company. payment agent. And so the Chinese bank, in essence, brings together an exporter and an importer: one sells the bank yuan, which the other buys.
Already 90% of Russia’s trade with China is carried out in national currencies, Putin said during his visit to China . But this did not eliminate numerous problems with payment. Because of them, Russian imports decreased in the first half of the year by 9% in monetary terms, and even more in physical terms: solving problems is expensive, prices for imported goods are rising. Some Chinese companies have given up on the Russian market and completely refused to sell goods to Russia – this has become difficult.
