The Ministry of Finance proposed to create a secret register of Russian property abroad

The Ministry of Finance proposed the creation of a special register of Russia’s foreign property, the maintenance of which is subject to the requirements of state secrets. Such a bill published on the site of legal acts.

“In the event that information about federal property recorded in the register is classified, all information about it and documents confirming this information are subject to exclusion from the register by the Federal Agency for State Property Management and return to the owner of the said property,” the document says.

The ministry also proposed establishing a procedure for the Federal Agency for State Property Management to conduct inspections of the effective use and safety of federal property.

Since the beginning of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine, Western countries have blocked Russian assets – we are talking about 300 billion euros of reserves of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation and 19 billion euros of private funds of Russian businessmen. In November 2022, the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen suggested create a structure for managing Russian assets. According to her, the blocked funds of the Bank of Russia and the assets of Russian oligarchs confiscated due to sanctions should be combined into a fund, the funds of which should be invested, and the profit from these investments should be used for compensation payments to Ukraine.

In January 2023, Dmitry Timofeev, Director of the Department for Control over External Restrictions of the Ministry of Finance of Russia, as part of a discussion at the Valdai Club “From Freezing to Confiscation: Risks for Russian Assets in the West” pointed outthat talks about the need to confiscate assets have been ongoing since March 2022, but so far there has been no particular progress on this issue.