Friendly diversification – Newspaper Kommersant No. 145 (7346) dated 08/11/2022

SPB Exchange plans to expand the number of depositories used to store foreign assets. The need for this arose due to the risk of blocking by foreign regulators and the desire of the Bank of Russia to limit the access of unqualified investors to foreign instruments.

As two sources told Kommersant in the financial market, SPB Exchange prepared a letter for the Bank of Russia with proposals to minimize infrastructure risks when trading foreign securities. The exchange is going to create a distributed custodial infrastructure with the storage of assets with various large counterparties. If now access to deposited securities is carried out through organizations in unfriendly countries, then in the proposed model it is proposed to store papers in infrastructure organizations in Hong Kong, China, Kazakhstan and a number of other countries, one of the interlocutors of Kommersant explained. The stock exchange and the Bank of Russia declined to comment.

Representatives of the exchange talked about the fact that the issue of creating a Euroclear-type depository is being studied, so that there are not three depositories, as it is now, but a group of depositories united in a single platform, another source told Kommersant in the stock market. In his opinion, this step is “quite justified”, as it “allows you to reduce risks in case of blocking a certain depository”. There were talks about the need to reduce existing infrastructure risks in the face of sanctions, the interlocutor of Kommersant confirmed in the market. “At the same time, various solutions were proposed: in particular, the possibility of transferring the exchange to Kazakhstan was discussed, it is possible that in the process of discussing and elaborating the issue, they could go towards creating a system of several depositories, which, by distributing accounts, would reduce the risk in the whole system” he added.

In fact, there is a struggle between two concepts – the central depository and its absence. “On the one hand, the centralization of information allows for more complete control, on the other hand, all the eggs end up in one basket,” says Ekaterina Makeeva, head of the AB A-PRO sanctions practice. At the same time, not all Kommersant’s interlocutors share the optimism regarding the proposed approach. The contract for the storage of securities in the depository is concluded by a foreign issuer and Russian stock exchanges cannot influence this part of the chain in any way, Ms. Makeeva said. “Given the constant increase in the sanctions imposed on the Russian Federation, options for a ban on trading in foreign securities are not ruled out. Plus, it is not known whether there will be a real opportunity to preserve the assets of the infrastructure being created in other countries, ”says Pavel Ganin, partner at atlegal law firm.

The preparation of the document is taking place against the backdrop of a steady growth in the shares of SPB Exchange. On Wednesday, August 10, they rose by 40% on the Moscow Exchange, returning to the values ​​of the end of June, and more than doubled in three days. However, the experts interviewed by Kommersant do not connect this with insider trading. Firstly, since the end of February, the shares of the St. Petersburg Exchange have lost more than 80% of their value, and secondly, the exchange increases the trading time for foreign securities, which was positively received by investors, says Sergey Suverov, investment strategist of Arikapital Management Company. At the same time, the further dynamics of the securities of the stock exchange, in his opinion, will depend on the outcome of the discussion between the professional community and the regulator on the possibility of buying shares of foreign companies by unqualified investors.

Ksenia Kulikova, Vitaly Gaidaev