The Ministry of Foreign Affairs called it a “fraudulent scheme” to recognize the circumvention of sanctions as a crime

The EU Council’s decision to criminalize sanctions circumvention and the possible confiscation of frozen Russian assets will “finally bury” the EU’s reputation as a safe jurisdiction for entrepreneurs. This was stated by the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, at a briefing on November 30, answering a question from Vedomosti.

“The EU leadership has been hatching such plans for several months now, developing some legal framework to create conditions for the seizure, theft, and confiscation of assets frozen in the EU belonging to Russian individuals and legal entities, which are subject to unilateral EU sanctions,” she recalled.

Before “expropriating” someone else’s property with “at least a semblance of legality”, Europe should take into account two aspects, Zakharova believes. Firstly, in this case, there is a high risk of massive filing of lawsuits by affected companies or individuals in the national courts of the EU member countries, which, unlike the European Union, “openly declare the primacy of political expediency before the law” and can “decide not in the right way [чиновникам ЕС]”, she noted.

Secondly, “fragments of the former reputation” of the EU as a guarantor of compliance with the basic principles of a market economy are at stake. As a result, the circumvention of sanctions is recognized at the general legal level as a criminal offense along with terrorism, the spread of drugs and weapons, money laundering, says a representative of the Foreign Ministry.

Zakharova called the decision of the EU Council “an absolutely fraudulent scheme” and “natural banditry.” “The person on the sanctions list is charged with the obligation to voluntarily declare his assets in the territory of the European Union. Failure to provide or incomplete provision of relevant information will automatically be treated as a criminally punishable attempt to circumvent sanctions with the possibility of subsequent confiscation of the asset. We are talking about unilateral restrictions that are applied by the EU in circumvention of the UN Security Council. Thus, they are absolutely illegitimate from the point of view of international law,” she explained.

The representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry believes that such decisions are “from the category of pseudo-legal exercises”, their implementation will “finally bury the reputation” of the European Union as a reliable jurisdiction for doing business and destroy the “foundations of the world order”. These measures are “imposed” on EU countries by Washington, she argues, and companies, in turn, leave the European continent – in particular, to the United States.

28 November EU Council unanimously approved the decision to include sanctions violations in the list of crimes in the European Union. Currently, this list includes terrorism, human trafficking, sexual exploitation of women and children, drug and arms trafficking, money laundering, counterfeiting of means of payment, corruption, cybercrime and organized crime. The European Commission submitted a proposal to include violations of restrictive measures in it on May 25.

Next, the European Commission should introduce a proposal for a directive containing minimum rules concerning the definition of criminal offenses and penalties for violation of restrictive measures. The document will then be sent for approval to the European Parliament and the EU Council.

The EU has taken a number of restrictive measures against Russia because of the NWO in Ukraine, and it is imperative that these measures are fully implemented, the EU Council said in a statement. The inclusion of violations of restrictive measures in the list of “EU crimes” is the first of two steps to ensure the same degree of compliance with sanctions throughout the Union and to stop attempts to circumvent or violate the imposed measures, the message emphasizes.

November 30 European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen suggested create a structure for managing Russian assets. According to her, the blocked funds of the Russian Central Bank 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.

Western countries have frozen the reserves of the Russian Central Bank. In the European Union, assets worth $24.5 billion (23 billion euros) were blocked – about 10% of the total number of international assets of the Russian Federation, said EU Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders. In addition, he added, in the United States there are international reserves of the Russian Federation in the amount of $100 billion.