German federal prosecutors said Wednesday they aim to seize hundreds of millions of euros from an unnamed Russian bank as part of a Western crackdown over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The federal public prosecutor’s office said in a statement it had filed a motion before a court in the German financial capital Frankfurt requesting “independent confiscation proceedings.”
“The aim of these proceedings is to seize more than 720 million euros ($789 million) deposited by a Russian financial institution in a bank account in Frankfurt am Main due to a suspected attempt to violate embargo regulations” under German law, it said.
In June 2022, the EU placed the Russian bank on a sanctions list, prosecutors said, adding that they had already filed the court motion in July. The statement on Wednesday followed media reports about the legal action.
“As a consequence, any assets of the entity deposited with European financial institutes could no longer be subject to transactions, but were ‘frozen’,” they said in the statement.
