Energy and banking giants Gazprom and Sberbank plus EN+, Lukoil and Polyus among firms
The London Stock Exchange has suspended trading in 27 companies with strong links to Russia, including energy and banking giants Gazprom and Sberbank.
The LSE said it was moving to block trading in the companies, which also include EN+, Lukoil and Polyus, with immediate effect “in light of market conditions, and in order to maintain orderly markets”.
Continue reading...Oleg Deripaska and Ukrainian-born Mikhail Fridman call for peace, as activities come under threat from sanctions
Russian billionaires Mikhail Fridman and Oleg Deripaska have become two of the country’s first leading businesspeople to speak out against Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Fridman, who is one of Russia’s richest men, controls private equity firm LetterOne and was a founder of Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest private bank. In a letter to his employees he called for an end to the “bloodshed”.
Continue reading...Selected Russian banks banned from global payments system, while Russian central bank will find it harder to spend $500bn war chest
It has taken a week to reach this point, but western governments have put down their peashooters and wheeled out the financial howitzers against Vladimir Putin.
Far-reaching new sanctions against Russia were announced on Saturday night in a joint statement from the EU, UK, US and Canada.
Continue reading...Questions raised over sponsorship of exhibitions by scandal-hit Swiss bank
The National Gallery’s partnership with Credit Suisse has been thrown into question after leaked documents revealed the hidden wealth of the bank’s criminal clients, including drug traffickers, money launderers and corrupt politicians.
Credit Suisse, headquartered in Zurich, has sponsored the National Gallery since 2008 in one of the UK’s biggest arts funding deals. The partnership, renewed in 2020 and due to run until at least 2024, means Credit Suisse’s name is linked to exhibitions for artists from Raphael and Monet to Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
Continue reading...Analysis: Only the financial equivalent of unleashing a nuclear arsenal will dent Russia’s foreign assets war chest
The war against Russia is one western countries want to fight with only economic sanctions, not guns.
Russia’s conflict with Ukraine, despite its long gestation and planning by Vladimir Putin and his supporters in the Kremlin, was supposed to end quickly once financial retaliation began. Yes, there would be military skirmishes on the ground, but little more than a few casualties were expected once a range of penalties began to bite.
Continue reading...Ukraine foreign minister voices anger as EU leaders likely to decide against blocking Russia from international payments system
The EU faced furious remonstrations from Kyiv as Europe’s leaders looked set to hold back from imposing the potentially most damaging sanction on Russia, even as the Kremlin lay siege to Ukraine via land, air and sea.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, voiced his anger as EU heads of state and government appeared likely to decide against blocking Russia from an international payments system through which it receives foreign currency.
Continue reading...Three biggest groups in European parliament support possible move to high-risk list for money laundering
All three of the largest groups in the European parliament are demanding that the EU assess whether Switzerland should be categorised as a high-risk country for money laundering and financial crime, as reaction to the Credit Suisse leak continues to reverberate about the world.
Less than 48 hours after the Guardian and other media published an investigation into the leak as part of the Suisse secrets project, political groups representing the majority of MEPs in the European parliament support the possible blacklisting of Switzerland.
Continue reading...Apparent due diligence failures by Swiss bank prompts centre-right calls for EU to review relationship with Switzerland
The fallout from a huge leak of Credit Suisse banking data threatened to damage Switzerland’s entire financial sector on Monday after the European parliament’s main political grouping raised the prospect of adding the country to a money-laundering blacklist.
The European People’s party (EPP), the largest political grouping of the European parliament, called for the EU to review its relationship with Switzerland and consider whether it should be added to its list of countries associated with a high risk of financial crime.
Continue reading...Leak shows King Abdullah was beneficial owner of at least six Credit Suisse accounts
In 2011, as popular revolts reverberated around the Middle East, a monarch in the midst of it all made some banking decisions. Sometime that year, as neighbouring Egypt and Syria withered in the face of momentous civil protests, King Abdullah II of Jordan opened two new accounts with Credit Suisse, the Swiss bank that had discreetly served the region’s well-heeled for decades.
Abdullah, one of the world’s longest-serving current monarchs, had chosen a banker that shared his approach to secrecy, particularly surrounding his personal wealth. Over the next five years, the king was the beneficial owner of at least six accounts with Credit Suisse, while his wife, Queen Rania, had another.
Continue reading...Roger Ng pleads not guilty to helping launder millions of dollars looted from Malaysian sovereign wealth fund
On the first day of a trial over the multibillion-dollar looting of a Malaysian government fund, US prosecutors on Monday accused a former Goldman Sachs banker of taking $35m in kickbacks as his defense team slammed the prosecution’s star witness as a bigamist who used their client as a fall guy.
Roger Ng, Goldman’s former head of investment banking in Malaysia, is charged with conspiring to launder money and violating anti-bribery law in his dealings with Malaysia’s 1MDB sovereign wealth fund.
Continue reading...We bring you Not the World Economic Forum, where monetary hawks fly and bankers explain why China is all right, really
The purpose of this column is usually fairly clear: to look ahead at the biggest event in the coming week. But this time we are breaking with tradition to bring you the week’s biggest non-event: Davos.
Every year the great and the good gather in the Swiss Alps at the grandly titled World Economic Forum to give their answers to the big questions. But Covid-19, running now into its fourth calendar year, has seen it called off again.
Continue reading...Enforced takeovers during the crisis will mean a bumper year for the bankers who advise on billion-dollar deals
Just as most of us are feeling the effects of soaring inflation, which the Office for National Statistics said last week had reached a 10-year high of 5.1%, wealthy bankers and traders are looking forward to receiving extraordinarily large new year bonuses.
Banks on both sides of the Atlantic are finalising bonus pool deals that could be inflated by as much as 50% compared with last year, reaching their highest levels since 2009 and the mergers and acquisitions boom that followed the financial crisis.
Continue reading...The year 2020 exposed the risks and weaknesses of the market-driven global system like never before. It’s hard to avoid the sense that a turning point has been reached. By Adam Tooze
Continue reading...Investment bank says it lost millions because of tweets by Elon Musk that he might take electric carmaker private
JPMorgan has sued Tesla for $162.2m, accusing Elon Musk’s electric car company of “flagrantly” breaching a 2014 contract relating to stock trading options that Tesla sold to the bank.
The options, or warrants, give the holder the right to buy a company’s stock at a set “strike” price and date. The suit, filed in a Manhattan federal court, centres on a dispute over how JPMorgan repriced its Tesla warrants as a result of Musk’s notorious 2018 tweet that he was considering taking the carmaker private.
Continue reading...Jamie Dimon let off 21-day hotel quarantine because he runs a ‘very huge bank’, says Carrie Lam
JP Morgan’s billionaire chief executive Jamie Dimon was allowed to skip Hong Kong’s strict 21-day hotel quarantine rules because he runs “a very huge bank” with “key business in Hong Kong”, the territory’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, said on Tuesday.
Dimon flew into Hong Kong on Monday on JP Morgan’s private jet, becoming the first Wall Street bank boss to visit the territory or mainland China since the pandemic began.
Continue reading...Regulators will compare the version of events he shared with Barclays with emails from JP Morgan
When it was revealed last year that Jes Staley had sailed his luxury yacht to a meeting with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on his private Caribbean island, the Barclays boss told colleagues he was “going nowhere”.
But on Monday Staley resigned as chief executive of Barclays after the board said it had been made aware of the preliminary conclusions of an investigation by City regulators into how he had characterised his relationship with Epstein to Barclays. Staley intends to contest the report’s findings.
Continue reading...After Tesco’s website and app were down for most of the weekend, leaving many frustrated customers unable to shop online, HSBC’s business banking portal (called HSBCnet) had some issues this morning.
Large corporate customers only had intermittent access via the website or app for about an hour, from 9.10am, but the problem has been fixed, according to HSBC.
This is truly a dark day for drivers, and one which we hoped we wouldn’t see again after the high prices of April 2012. This will hurt many household budgets and no doubt have knock-on implications for the wider economy.
Continue reading...Bank also pleads guilty to wire fraud and forgives hundred of millions of dollars of debt owed by country
Credit Suisse has been fined nearly £350m by global regulators, pleaded guilty to wire fraud, and agreed to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars worth of debt owed by Mozambique in an attempt to draw a line under the long-running “tuna bonds” loan scandal.
The Swiss banking company had been accused of “serious” failings in its financial crime controls by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and has entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the US Department of Justice that will put the bank under heavy monitoring for three years after having “defrauded US and international investors”.
Continue reading...Andreas Fontana’s debut feature is an unnervingly subtle drama about a Swiss private banker visiting clients in Argentina during the period of the military junta and ‘disappearances’
Pure evil is all around in this unnervingly subtle, sophisticated movie; an eerie oppression in the air. Andreas Fontana is a Swiss director making his feature debut with this conspiracy drama-thriller, shot with a kind of desiccated blankness, about the occult world of super-wealth and things not to be talked about. The title is a Swiss banker’s code-word in conversation for “Be silent”.
It is set in 1980 in Argentina, at the time of the junta’s dirty war against leftists and dissidents, and you could set it alongside recent movies including Benjamín Naishtat’s Rojo (2018) and Francisco Márquez’s A Common Crime (2020), which intuited the almost supernatural fear among those left behind when people they knew had vanished and joined los desaparecidos, the disappeared ones. But Azor gives a queasy new perspective on the horror of those times, and there is even a nauseous echo of the Swiss banks’ attitude to their German neighbours in the second world war.
Continue reading...Thirty-five organisations implore Australia, which is ADB’s fifth-largest shareholder, to help the region ‘make a just and equitable low-carbon transition’
The Australian government is being urged to support an end to the financing of fossil fuel projects as the Asian Development Bank prepares to signs off on a new energy policy later this month.
The ADB “will not support coalmining, processing, storage, and transportation, nor any new coal-fired power generation”, according to a draft version of the policy, which also endorses “the early retirement of coal-based power plants”.
Continue reading...