Capital Economy, Business and Finance
The biggest western bank still operating in Russia is slowly, cautiously and immensely profitably starting to indicate that it may eventually be serious about getting out. Those who think the moral case for continuing to do business with the Putin regime is non-existent should not hold their breath, but Austria’s Raiffeissen Bank has stopped making dollar payments out of Russia following a US threat of secondary sanctions for hatching a plan to swap some of its Russian assets for Austrian assets still held by the sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
The bank says it’s committed to the “deconsolidation” of its Russian subsidiary, but whatever that means it hasn’t prevented that subsidiary growing its headcount by 7 per cent to 10,000 since the invasion of Ukraine, trebling its annual profit to €1.8 billion since 2021 and paying about half a billion dollars a year in taxes to the Russian war machine. The Economist has done yeoman work on the Raiffeissen scandal, but largely without naming Raiffeissen’s CEO. He’s Johann Strobl, a former assistant professor at the University of Vienna, earning an estimated €2.6 million a year.