Tan Albayrak, a sanctions lawyer at Reed Smith, agreed: \u201cI do not see a legal basis, either way, because the funds are frozen.\u00a0 They cannot be used to fulfill any of the parties\u2019 wishes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIn sanctions laws, frozen means frozen \u2014 and just that,\u201d said Albayrak. \u201cNormally, the funds can\u2019t be distributed \u2014 neither according to Mr. Abramovich\u2019s wishes nor to the U.K. government\u2019s wishes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Still, the \u00a32.5 billion figure pales in comparison to the hundreds of billions of pounds frozen by the EU and U.K. since the Ukraine invasion in 2022. Despite bold statements, the British government is reluctant to sail into legally uncharted waters.<\/p>\n
While Britain has frozen around \u00a324 billion<\/a> of Russian assets, and the EU has \u20ac200 billion<\/a>, they have only gone so far as to use the interest gained on the funds to help Ukraine, rather than seizing them outright, and politicians remain deeply nervous about going any further.<\/p>\n In March, the Belgian Prime Minister said that to do so would be \u201can act of war\u201d which could create \u201csystemic risks to the entire financial world system.\u201d<\/p>\n The sanctions lawyer quoted above thinks the government via the Reeves and Lammy statement \u201cwants to show they\u2019re not afraid to put their foot down on sanctions.\u201d But, they added: \u201cThey don\u2019t have a mechanism to do this. There’s no way of doing this via civil litigation at all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tan Albayrak, a sanctions lawyer at Reed Smith, agreed: \u201cI do not see a legal basis, either way,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":156495,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[331,30,6217,473,809,12,619,332,2663,811,2824,16,657,15,333,771,335],"class_list":{"0":"post-156494","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"category-united-kingdom","9":"tag-banks","10":"tag-courts","11":"tag-david-lammy","12":"tag-defense","13":"tag-negotiations","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-rachel-reeves","16":"tag-russia","17":"tag-sanctions","18":"tag-security","19":"tag-tanks","20":"tag-uk","21":"tag-ukraine","22":"tag-united-kingdom","23":"tag-vladimir-putin","24":"tag-war","25":"tag-war-in-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114623062095777573","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}