Former government minister Stef Blok said that Dutch authorities have identified and put freezing orders on between €500 million ($539 million) and €600 million of Russian assets as the country seeks to enact European Union sanctions "of unprecedented magnitude."
"In the Netherlands, we have now frozen between 500 and 600 million in Russian assets," Blok, the Netherlands' national coordinator for sanctions compliance and enforcement, said on Wednesday. "This means we are not at the bottom of the European ranking."
The Dutch asset freezes criminalize businesses interacting with any funds or assets owned or controlled by the sanctioned person or company.
"For the few countries that have frozen more, specific circumstances applied," the former foreign minister said in comments carried by the Dutch government website. "For example, the French central bank had 22 billion euros from the Russian central bank in its account. That was not the case with us."
European Union and Dutch privacy law initially caused problems for authorities as they blocked the exchange of information between government agencies, Blok said. But the Dutch government has created new regulations to allow sanctioning authorities to bypass these regulations.
"We have strict privacy legislation in the Netherlands and Europe," Blok said. "It is there for a reason: governments are not allowed to just share information about companies and individuals, explicit permission is required for this.
"But, if you impose sanctions on a large scale, privacy can actually form a block. That means you have to change the rules. And so we do." Blok added.
Blok's announcement comes in a week when Russian companies, politicians and oligarchs have been hit with a host of new sanctions. Even the British crown dependency of Jersey has frozen over $7 billion worth of assets suspected of being connected to Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich.
In a separate move, the U.K. government sanctioned two associates of Abramovich on Thursday. David Davidovich and Canadian financier Eugene Tenenbaum, a director of Chelsea FC, were targeted in the latest move. The sanctions notice did not say why the two men were sanctioned, other than that they are both associated with Abramovich.
The government in London also added 206 people to its Russian sanctions list on Wednesday.
They included Saodat Narzieva, sister of Russian-Uzbek oligarch Alisher Usmanov, the billionaire owner of the Kommersant publishing house and a former shareholder in Arsenal Football Club in London. The U.K. government alleges that Usmanov transferred $3 million, 27 Swiss bank accounts, along with other large financial assets.
"In the wake of horrific rocket attacks on civilians in Eastern Ukraine, we are today sanctioning those who prop up the illegal breakaway regions and are complicit in atrocities against the Ukrainian people," U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said at the time.
The new U.K. sanctions bring financial restrictions upon family members of already-sanctioned oligarchs, such as Pavel Ezubov, the cousin of Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire owner of aluminum company Rusal.
The sanctions include asset freezes along with travel bans and transport sanctions against the individuals, meaning they would be prevented from crossing U.K. borders and landing any of their boats or aircraft within its borders.
The British foreign secretary said 178 of the new 206 sanctions were connected to the breakaway regions of Ukraine, mainly the self-styled Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics. The new sanctions bring the total number of companies and individuals sanctioned by the U.K. to more than 1,400.
The former head of Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin, was placed under sanctions by the U.K. government. The state-owned railway operator, RZD OAO, became the first Russian company to default on a bond payment on Monday after Western sanctions for the invasion of Ukraine were imposed.
--Editing by Ed Harris.
Update: This story has been updated to add the latest sanctions imposed by Britain on Thursday.
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