April 25, 2024 (EIRNS)—Yesterday a Russian court ordered the freezing of JPMorgan Chase’s funds that exist inside Russia. The St. Petersburg court ruled in favor of Russia’s second-largest lender, VTB, which is seeking to recover $439.5 million from JPMorgan, as RT reported today. Previously, the United States, as part of aggressive sanction activities, had blocked that much in VTB’s funds held in JPMorgan.
The court’s order targeted funds not only in JPMorgan’s Russian accounts, but also any “movable and immovable property” of the Wall Street entity in Russia. VTB had only initiated its legal suit on April 17, it appears, but requested interim measures, as JPMorgan was “taking measures to withdraw their assets” from Russia. The court yesterday granted that interim measure.
In a related development, today, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov warned the United States that the so-called “REPO Act”—authorizing President Biden to confiscate Russian funds held in American banks and hand them over to Kyiv—would have consequences. RIA Novosti reported Ryabkov as saying: “We are now studying the appropriate form of reaction, where among the countermeasures there are actions against the assets of our Western opponents and diplomatic measures of response.” He added that they could choose to employ one or both: “One does not cancel the other, but there are simply no solutions yet, because there are no solutions on the other side, either.”
