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Eastern Europe
February 16, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 19
Trump’s disgraced former national security ad- viser, in her new role as a Soviet intelligence historian.
Lokhova was taunted by her London colleagues with unfounded allegations of drug use and driven to a mental breakdown, an employment tribunal ruled. She later passed a drug test taken at her insistence, while the tribunal ruled that then UK boss Paolo Zaniboni had victimised her by failing to discipline the London-based bankers who bullied her.
The former saleswoman was eventually awarded £3.2mn after finding she had been a victim of harassment, victimisation and discrimination amounting to constructive dismissal. Zaniboni and David Longmuir, a banker who was also implicated in the case, have both since left the London business.
Sanctions do not prohibit clients from trading with Sberbank, but they do restrict investors from ac- cessing debt and equity financing. To compound matters, many leading UK, European and US fund managers opted to sever trading lines entirely with Sberbank for fear of incurring the wrath of Wall Street regulators.
The number of employees at Sberbank's London office shrank last year to 30 from 37 for the prior year. Chief operating officer Adam Jesney was appointed as acting chief executive last year following Zaniboni’s departure.
Gref, a former economy minister under President Vladimir Putin, told Bloomberg News in 2016 that investment banking is “not our strategy in the long term”, because it’s not growing as fast as the bank’s retail or corporate units. Gref has soured on investment banking since paying Armenian banker Ruben Vardanyan and his colleagues more
than $1bn in 2011 for Troika Dialog. The business was later rebranded Sberbank CIB.
bne IntelliNews previously reported exclusively that Gazprombank, Russia’s third-largest lender, had wound up its London business after it, like Sberbank, was sanctioned by the US and EU over Russian military adventurism in Ukraine. bne IntelliNews also broke the news in November that Russia’s UralSib had put its London unit up for sale. A sale of UralSib Securities to the emerging markets brokerage ITI Capital was finalised last year.
Not all Russia banks are decamping from Lon- dongrad even as many of their European, US and Chinese counterparts look to Frankfurt, Dublin and Luxembourg for new EU HQs.
VTB, Russia’s second-biggest lender, has been tempering initial talk that Brexit may force its retreat from London. A Financial Times report in October cited VTB deputy chairman Herbert Moos as saying the board was considering relocating its European HQ to an alternative hub, such as Frankfurt, Paris or Vienna.
Since then, however, VTB has been keen to damp speculation that it may be retrenching from the UK, In March, the bank even hired several senior bankers in London from both Deutsche Bank and J.P. Morgan.
BSC Global Markets, the leading Russian broker- age on the Moscow exchange, is keen to keep growing its London business from its location at the Tower 42 office block.
“Let’s wait and see how the chips fall,” Luis Saenz, head of equity sales and trading at BCS in London old bne IntelliNews. “We think it’s too soon to tell how things pan out to make any decisions now.”