Financial sanctions have been placed on Putin and foreign secretary Lavrov directly by the US. There have never been sanctions against any of previous guy’s mistresses, even though he transferred to one as hush money, the equivalent of Putin’s annual salary. “On top of personally targeting Putin with sanctions, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson called for 'immediate action' to punish Russia through the SWIFT financial transaction service.”
WASHINGTON -- The United States will impose a slate of sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin, following similar sanctions announced Friday by the United Kingdom and the European Union.
Putin joins a growing list of elite Russian government officials who have been sanctioned by the United States in response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
Twice this week, the United States has announced new sanctions against Russia’s largest banks and its sovereign debt, cutting them off from the U.S. banking system.
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Putin publicly claims his salary of roughly $140,000 as his only source of income, and lists his assets as two apartments and a few vehicles.
In reality, Putin lives in a palatial home larger than Buckingham Palace, and has been photographed repeatedly wearing watches that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Experts and former Kremlin insiders believe Putin is worth billions of dollars, and that he uses the global shadow banking system to hide his money.
Putin also appears to control assets in Europe, according to the Pandora Papers investigation, published in Oct. 2021. The leaked documents revealed a $4.1 million apartment in Monaco that was owned by a Russian woman who did not have any apparent source of income, but who had been romantically linked to Putin for years.
www.cnbc.com/...
BRUSSELS — European Union foreign ministers agreed Friday to freeze the assets of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, the first time the two men have been targeted personally by such measures.
The decision, part of a larger round of sanctions approved to punish Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, likely won’t be the last step taken against the Kremlin during the conflict, policymakers said.
It wasn’t clear how many E.U.-based assets the two men control, and E.U. foreign policy officials said that it would take some technical work to target the sanctions properly. Neither man will be barred from traveling to the European Union, a step that in some ways would have been more concrete but could also have complicated any diplomatic settlement to the escalating violence that Russia is inflicting on its neighbor.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
- In your home you have a thermostat. When the thermostat recognizes that the temperature is too low, it sends an electrical signal to your furnace to heat up some air and blow it into each room via heat ducts. 2/
- In this analogy, SWIFT is the thermostat system, the the warm air is the $$$, and the ducts are correspondent bank accounts. 3/
- SWIFT is how banks communicate with each other, requesting that $$$ be moved from one account to the next. But, just like the thermostat doesn't move warm air around your house, SWIFT doesn't move $$$ around the world. 4/
- $$$ flows from one account to the next via correspondent banking accounts. This is the "duct work" of global finance. 5/
- The US banking sanctions unveiled today prohibit specific targeted banks from accessing the duct work that moves $$$ around the world. 6/
- OTOH, SWIFT sanctions would apply at the country level and cut off all Russian financial institutions from the thermostat (messaging system). But SWIFT sanctions would *not* cut all Russian banks off from the duct work. 7/
- Technically, Russian banks not targeted directly by Treasury could attempt to find messaging workarounds, even if they were cut off from SWIFT. But this would take time and have substantial transaction costs. 8/
- Banks (like VTB) targeted directly by Treasury won't be able to move $$$ through the financial ducts. To use the analogy, it is as if you were to disconnect a room from the heating ducts. Even if it had a thermostat, it wouldn't matter--heat would no longer reach the room. 9/
- So, the targeted sanctions announced today are more severe for individual banks, but they are much narrower in scope.
Fin.
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