MOSCOW (Reuters) -Customers of UniCredit’s Russian subsidiary will be unable to send U.S. dollars out of Russia after June 6, a note sent by the bank to its clients showed on Tuesday.
Italy’s UniCredit is among only a handful of international banks that remained in Russia after Moscow despatched troops to Ukraine in February 2022, and it has been under growing pressure from the European Central Bank and latterly the Italian authorities to wind down its presence there.
CEO Andrea Orcel said in May that UniCredit was targeting a full, orderly exit from its Russian retail business by the first half of next year.
UniCredit’s stopping outgoing dollar transfers further limits the options for individuals trying to take money out of Russia.
Most Russian banks are under Western sanctions and blocked from the SWIFT global payments network, while the largest foreign bank in Russia, Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank International, made a similar move to halt outgoing FX transfers in 2024.
In the note to clients, UniCredit said the reason for halting outgoing dollar payments was because its correspondent bank for outgoing payments was changing to UniCredit S.p.A., Italy, from JPMorgan Chase Bank, on May 26.
Correspondent banking involves arrangements between banks that allow them to make payments between one another and move money around the globe.
The note said that outgoing dollar transfers would be unavailable due to “restrictions on the side of the correspondent bank”.
UniCredit declined to comment when asked to specify what those restrictions were.
(Reporting by Reuters. Writing by Alexander Marrow. Editing by Mark Potter)
