MOSCOW, August 18 (RIA Novosti) - Western sanctions against Russia are a major threat to globalization, Bloomberg quoted Hans-Joerg Rudloff, former chairman of investment banking at British banking giant Barclays as saying.
“Since 1990, we, meaning the entire banking industry, were going all over the world, lending and investing money, selling what we considered in those days the Western model of market economy,” Rudloff, who was also a Rosneft board member until last year, said, adding that sanctions against Russia pose “the biggest threat to globalization since the early 1990s…If you were the CEO of a big bank, are you going to put yourself on the radar screen of a US government that is telling you not to deal with Russia?”
Foreign banks have tightened credit for all Russian companies, even those not featured in the sanctions. Banks, especially those bailed out by the taxpayer and still trying to restore their tarnished reputations, are nervous about lending to Russia. Not a single US dollar, euro or Swiss franc was lent to a Russian company in July, according to Bloomberg research.
However, although Russia's state-owned banks have been banned from raising funds on Wall Street, the City of London and other Western capital markets, for the time being they are not total economic outlaws. Timothy Ash, head of emerging market research at Standard Bank, told The Guardian that if the West was really serious, it would have banned the trading of Russian bank debt on secondary markets, closing a loophole that allows Russian bank debt to remain a valid asset.
Five Russian banks, including Sberbank, the country’s largest, have been banned from raising capital on EU capital markets. The bans were part of multiple rounds of Western sanctions against Russia.
The first round of sanctions was implemented by the United States and the European Union back in March as a response to Crimea’s reunification with Russia following a referendum. As the Ukrainian crisis escalated, Switzerland, Canada, Australia and Japan gave in to US pressure and drew up their own sanctions.
In response to Western sanctions, Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed an order on economic measures to protect the country’s security. The decree banned the imports of agricultural and food products from the countries that had imposed sanctions on Russia for one year.
