By Andrei Skvarsky.
Chris Weafer, who has spent 15 years as a top researcher in Russian investment banking, argues that the European Union’s sanctions against Russia’s biggest bank Sberbank and number-two lender VTB are unlikely to cause “a major disruption” to the Russian economy this year.
However, the punitive measures against the two firms will “put a drag on investment spending in 2015”, Weafer, a founding partner at Moscow-based investment consultancy Macro-Advisory, said in a piece written a few days before the EU blacklisted Sberbank, VTB and three other state-controlled lenders for their alleged roles in the Kremlin’s involvement in Ukraine.
Weafer, who a while ago was chief investment strategist at Sberbank and had previously been Russia strategist for UralSib, chief strategist at Alfa Bank, and head of research at Troika Dialog, also described the EU penalties against Sberbank and VTB as a first step towards so-called “tier 3” sanctions, which would penalise whole sectors of the Russian economy.
He said, however, that the threat of tier 3 penalties, also known as sectoral sanctions, coming any time soon “remains relatively low, although of course given the very fluid situation in eastern Ukraine that cannot be comfortably ruled out”.
With Sberbank, VTB, development lender Vnesheconombank, third-biggest lender Gazprombank and Russian Agricultural Bank sanctioned, practically the entire state-controlled part of Russia’s banking will have only minimal access to European capital markets.
On top of the EU and similar US sanctions, an international arbitration court in The Hague a week ago ordered Russia to pay $50bn to the former majority shareholders of Yukos for seizing the assets of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s oil giant and thereby striking the company out of existence.
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