Page 139 - RusRPTJun24

The St Petersburg ruling affects €462.7mn ($503mn) in securities, real estate, and accounts belonging to UniCredit. Additionally, it covers 100% of shares in UniCredit Leasing and UniCredit Garant, both subsidiaries of AO UniCredit Bank, the Italian group's Russian arm, which held €8.67bn in assets at the end of 2023, down from €10.16bn the previous year.
In a statement, UniCredit said the seizure impacted only a fraction of their Russian unit's assets. "The rest of the details we are currently reviewing," the bank stated.
The same court in St Petersburg ruled in favour of seizing $260mn from Deutsche Bank, documents dated May 16 showed.
Both decisions came in answer to a complaint made by RusKhimAlians, which was planning to build a major gas processing and liquefaction plant in cooperation with German company Linde, which pulled out of the project due to Russia's military assault, the Moscow Times reports.
RusKhimAlians is a joint venture 50% owned by Russian gas giant Gazprom and made a €2bn advance payment on the €10bn contract, according to the UK's Supreme Court website, Reuters reports. The two foreign banks had guaranteed the financing for the project.
Two years after the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, major European banks continue to operate increasingly profitable branches in Russia despite public promises to close them. Bloomberg points to the fact that the combined number of employees of the five EU banks with the largest operations in Russia fell by only 3% after the invasion, while profits increased by about 200% thanks to the high interest rates on the funds stuck in the country.
Bank St. Petersburg disclosed financial results for 1Q24 under IFRS. Year to date, the loan portfolio has grown by 3% (led by cooperative clients), while the quality of the loan portfolio has contributed to a further reduction in the cost of risk (0.1% in 1Q24 after 0.4% in 4Q23). Customer funds remained at approximately the same level, while the share of current accounts increased by 1 percentage point. up to 49%.
Taking into account low funding costs and an increased loan-to-deposit ratio (by 4 pp to 105%, according to our estimates), the increase in the key rate contributed to the expansion of the net interest margin to 6.9%, according to our estimates (5.6% in 1Q23 ), which, despite the restrained growth rates of the loan portfolio, contributed to the growth of net interest income by 53% y/y and 7% q/q. Net commission income in 1Q24 decreased by 25% y/y and 13% q/q, in the first case due to a decrease in income from transactions with “traditional” foreign currencies, in the second – largely due to seasonal factors. The bank managed to contain the growth of operating expenses (-1% y/y,
139 RUSSIA Country Report June 2024 www.intellinews.com