Nearly all Chinese banks are refusing payments from Russia, a report from the Russian outlet Izvestia says.
Russia has been using smaller banks and non-US-dollar currencies to bypass Western sanctions.
But doors to alternative transfer methods are closing fast; Russia is now looking to crypto and barter trade.
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The impact of the West's sanctions just seems to be getting worse and worse for Russia.
Now, 98% of Chinese banks — even small regional ones — are refusing to accept direct Chinese payment transfers from Russia, Alexey Razumovsky, the commercial director of the payments company Impaya Rus, told the pro-Kremlin media outlet Izvestia.
Such issues appear to have intensified over the past three weeks, as smaller Chinese financial companies were still processing Russian payments in May and June, Izvestia reported.
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Fandorin on August 16th, 2024 at 17:53 UTC »
I was part of a big AML and Sanctions enforcement overhaul at a major US bank when the full-scale invasion kicked off. When processing wires, we looked at not just where the payment was coming from, but also the trail that's included in the file. The way that wire files are structured, there's a full trail of originating party, bank, and a list of all subsequent parties involved in the payment. So, we would flag payments if the payment went through a sanctioned country at any time. The bank OFAC filter, which is the very first system the file goes through, would block any payment originating from a sanctioned country, but we also reviewed any transaction that had a sanctioned country in the history, which made it very difficult to circumvent the filter. We also did enough business in other countries, that we could tell which banks were processing Russian money that never made it to the US, and flag those specific banks for extra review, or block them altogether. Despite the hate, most US banks are very good about doing this. Some stuff gets through because of individual bad actors, but the laws and oversite in place makes it very hard to evade sanctions systemically. I got some entertaining stories if anyone is interested.
Loki-L on August 16th, 2024 at 15:04 UTC »
That is even better/worse than the headline makes it sound.
Ehldas on August 16th, 2024 at 14:42 UTC »
The US has been steadily tracing payments and warning banks, both individually and via high-level visits to China.
Any bank which violates the sanctions against Russian banks risks being summarily cut off from Western banks, which is a commercial death-sentence.