The Jacques Delors Center advocates the establishment of a central EU asset register to make sanctions more accurate.
Vienna/Brussels. More and more Russian oligarchs are being targeted by the European Union for sanctions. In the latest round, such illustrious names as aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska and Herman Gref, head of Russia’s largest bank Sberbank, were added to the blacklist. But the actual implementation of the EU’s personal sanctions is mediocre – because with many assets in Europe, Europeans are not clear about who actually owns them. And this problem is by no means limited to the assets of Russian billionaires: According to calculations by the EU Commission, between 117 and 210 billion euros were shifted past the European financial authorities in 2019.
The enormous range in the above estimate indicates that the handling of wealth in the EU requires a large dose of glasnost, to invoke the name of CPSU leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s late-Soviet transparency campaign. According to Sebastian Mack from the Hertie School at the Jacques Delors Center in Berlin, whose study on the subject was published on Wednesday, the EU has already put together the most important building blocks for creating an effective means of combating opaque cash flows: a central European asset register.