The Bank of China has restricted transactions for Russian bank clients to banks located in the EU, US, Switzerland, and the UK, RBC reports, citing Modulbank and Finam representatives.
UniCredit and Akibank also reported the same limitations.
According to the Modulbank spokesperson, the restrictions affected all the banks that use the Bank of China as the main correspondent bank for yuan transactions.
“The decision was not made by China, but rather by the EU and the US. That is how they are trying to ramp up the sanction pressure by choking off alternative channels in the form of yuan,” Pavel Semyonov, chairman of the board of Modulbank, said.
The Finam bank indicated, in turn, that the Bank of China had terminated transactions in Chinese yuan, US dollars, Hong Kong dollars, and euros through the correspondent accounts of the Chinese bank.
Experts point out that currency transfers to the Western countries via BoC could have been used by Russian companies to settle foreign trade transactions in absence of any other legal ways to do so.
