By Andrei Skvarsky.
Sberbank has suspended plans to launch transactions in cryptocurrencies because of the Russian government’s “negative” position on digital money, a top manager at Russia’s biggest lender said last week.
Late in January 2018, Andrey Shemetov, Sberbank’s head of global markets, said at a briefing in Moscow that the bank was making arrangements to start trading cryptocurrencies via its Swiss subsidiary, Zurich-based Sberbank (Switzerland) AG.
He told EmergingMarkets.me that trade was expected to start “in the first or second quarter [of 2018] – sometime during the first half of the year anyway”.
As today, Russia had no legal framework at that time for cryptocurrency operations while crypto transactions were legal in Switzerland.
“We want to keep our clients happy, and so we believe we should have strategic access to any kind of service and any product,” Shemetov said at the 2018 briefing.
“We are building a full-scale trading set-up so that we’re able to … open our own positions and provide client services, in other words to buy and sell.”
In those days, Russia’s parliament was working on a bill to allow cryptocurrency transactions after the Russian government’s position on cryptos had evolutionised from complete rejection to cautious acceptance.
The draft law, which put cryptocurrencies among “digital financial assets” and would have allowed their use while controversially reaffirming the status of the rouble as “the sole legal tender” within Russia, passed the first reading in May 2018.
However, the terms “cryptocurrency”, “token” and “smart contract” were deleted from the bill for the second reading, which has still not taken place.
Shemetov told a news conference in Moscow last week that Sberbank had put its plans for cryptocurrency trading via its Swiss subsidiary on hold because of the Russian government’s generally “negative” attitude to cryptos.
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