“There are six member states doing this work,” he said. “We have a situation where some member states give us a lot of information, while others give us information about very low amounts” and “things get more complicated when certain countries don’t communicate.”
According to Reynders, Germany, France, Ireland, Austria, Belgium and Luxembourg account for 12.7 billion euros of the 13.9 billion euros that are now frozen in the EU, while the EU has 27 member states. The Belgian believes that other countries should do more to secure Russian money.
Unclear about the Netherlands
Not so long ago, De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) announced that banks in the Netherlands had frozen or withheld 1.2 billion euros of Russian assets until mid-June. But it’s not entirely clear how these numbers correlate with the amounts mentioned by Reynders. In Germany, Finance Minister Christian Lindner said in June that nearly €4.5 billion had been frozen in his country
Repo, a special working group working on sanctions against states, calculated at the end of last month that more than $330 billion in financial resources had already been secured worldwide. It will be $30 billion from oligarchs’ money and $300 billion from the Central Bank of Moscow. A number of luxury yachts and other properties were also seized.
