Raiffeisenbank was ordered to urgently present a plan for leaving Russia and was threatened to be cut off from dollars

European and American regulators are putting intense pressure on Austria's Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) to wind down its Russian operations. A year and a half ago, they even studied the possibility of splitting it up. Now the United States is threatening to disconnect Raiffeisen from the dollar system, and eurozone regulators, considering the behavior of the bank’s management dishonest, demanded that a plan for leaving Russia be prepared as soon as possible.

The Russian division of the banking group was the most profitable before the war, and now it accounts for more than half of its profits. Its success now is largely due to the fact that Raiffeisenbank remained one of the few official channels for transferring currency from Russia to Western countries, which made it possible to raise commissions. Russian authorities have repeatedly stated that they would like the bank to continue operating. He himself said that he intended to leave, but could not give a time frame. In Russia, he actually has capital blocked for 5 billion euros.

But regulators’ patience is running out, Reuters writes, based on conversations with a dozen and a half representatives of regulatory authorities in the US, Austria and the eurozone, as well as people with direct knowledge of the situation at the bank. One of them said that in June, representatives of the European Central Bank participated in a meeting of the RBI supervisory board and demanded to present a plan for leaving Russia in the coming weeks.