Originally Posted by
METO Guido
Slovakia's Prime Minister Robert Fico warned that his country will oppose using Russian frozen assets to fund Ukraine's defense spending, speaking with Slovakian public broadcaster STVR on Saturday.
I know you aren’t blaming them. Critics of reluctant border zone governments are using their pushback rhetoric as a convenient excuse. So the Slovak PM’s bottom line; no support for the proposed, ‘crucial’ EU/IMF loan guarantees. Fantasy on the part of Western finance ministers it’ll happen in unity. Outcome of this proxy slog lies in the hands of a budget deadlocked continental congress.No change there.
I think the real holdup is Belgium (population 11.9 million) whose bank holds about $200 billion in impounded Russian assets. While some of this is Russian state money a lot of it is from everyone from oligarchs thought to be friendly with Putin to pretty much Joe average Russian. And not having anticipated the situation, the provision of even freezing the assets is legally questionable under both Belgian and EU law, and they have the same sort of prohibition of ex post facto law making as the US constitution has.
That’s why Belgium is vetoing any actual use of those deposits (as opposed to interest earned on those deposits) until/unless other members of the EU agree to accept their pro rata share of the legal liability if/when those legal cases eventually make their way through the glacially slow European civil courts system.
For an in depth discussion, read this:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegDa...)775908_EN.pdf
Point one is, Belgium doesn’t want to be the only one without a chair when the music stops. They want the rest of the Eu to indemnify them against legal losses.
Point two is, banking is big business in Belgium. Belgian banks hold about €1.15 Trillion in assets, much of that from overseas. They fear that if the precedent is set that if the international community gets mad at your government your money gets seized, then a lot of those deposits are going to go elsewhere when this is all over.