Finanz und Wirtschaft, November 24, 2018. PDF. Ökonomenstimme, November 26, 2018. HTML.
In the FAZ, Philip Plickert reports that Deutsche Bundesbank changed its terms of business. Starting August 25, the Bundesbank may refuse cash transactions with a bank if the Bundesbank fears that, counter to the bank’s assurances, the cash transaction might help the bank or its customers evade sanctions or restrictions with the aim to impede money laundering or terrorism finance.
Conveniently, this will allow the Bundesbank to reject a request by European-Iranian Handelsbank to withdraw several hundred Euros.
Die staatliche Europäisch-Iranische Handelsbank (EIHB) in Hamburg hatte Anfang Juli bei der Bundesbank beantragt, mehr als 300 Millionen Euro in bar abzuheben. Nach Informationen der F.A.Z. war sogar von 350 bis 380 Millionen Euro die Rede. Dem Vernehmen nach soll es sich um Guthaben der iranischen Zentralbank bei der EIHB handeln. … Derzeit prüft die Finanzaufsicht Bafin, ob die EIHB die Vorschriften zur Prävention von Geldwäsche und Terrorfinanzierung einhält. Diese Prüfung könne sich hinziehen, heißt es in Berlin aus dem Finanzministerium. Bis die Bafin ihr Urteil abgibt, dürften die geänderten AGB der Bundesbank greifen.
The US has pressured the German government to prevent the cash withdrawal. And the Bundesbank closely cooperates with the Federal Reserve.
In ihren geänderten Geschäftsbedingungen ist explizit die Rede davon, dass auch die „drohende Beendigung von wichtigen Beziehungen zu Zentralbanken und Finanzinstitutionen dritter Länder“ ein Ablehnungsgrund für Bargeldgeschäfte sein könne.
In July, JP Koning had blogged about the bank’s request. His conclusion was:
There are sound political and moral reasons for both censoring Iran and not censoring it. Moral or not, my guess is that most nations will breathe a sigh of relief if German authorities see it fit to let the €300 million cash withdrawal go through. It would be a sign to all of us that we don’t live in a unipolar monetary world where a single American censor can prevent entire nations from making the most basic of cross-border payments. Instead, we’d be living in a bipolar monetary world where censorship needn’t mean being completely cutoff from the global payments system.
The sooner the Bundesbank prints up and dispatches the €300 million, the better for us all.
In an earlier column, Koning had described the difficulties for financial institutions worldwide to circumvent U.S. financial sanctions.
On Moneyness, JP Koning discusses the ability or not of the U.S. treasury to enforce financial sanctions overseas. Focusing on the Iran sanctions that ran from 2010 to 2015 (with strong international support) and are scheduled to be reimposed soon (without such support) Koning compares the U.S. sanctions regime to an exclusivity agreement that a large retailer imposes on a manufacturer.
Foreign banks in places like Europe were free to continue providing transactions services to Iran, but if they did so they would not be able to maintain correspondent accounts at U.S. banks. To ensure these rules were enforced, U.S. banks were to be fined and U.S. bank executives incarcerated if found guilty of providing accounts to offenders. Fearful bank executives were very quick to comply by carefully vetting those that they offered correspondent banking services to.
Having a U.S. correspondent account is very important to a non-US bank. If a European bank has a corporate customer who wants to make a U.S. dollar payment, the bank’s correspondent relationship with a U.S. bank allows it to effect that payment. Since the revenues from U.S. dollar payments far exceeds revenues from providing Iranian agencies and corporations with payments services, a typical European bank would have had no choice but to abandon Iran in order to keep its U.S. correspondent account.
But what would happen if Iran were to invoice in EUR rather than USD and make payments using an account at a European bank, bank X say, without direct links to the U.S. and no U.S. correspondent account? The answer to that question depends on whether the U.S. treasury would be prepared to sanction a third financial institution, bank Y say, that collaborates with bank X (or a business partner of bank X) and relies on a U.S. correspondent account. In the most extreme scenario bank Y would be the European Central Bank.
One scheme would be to set up a single sanctions-remote bank that conducts all Iranian business. To defang the U.S. Treasury’s threat “do business with us, or them, but not both!”, this bank should not be dependent on U.S. dollar business. Without a U.S. correspondent, the Treasury’s threat to disconnect it from the correspondent network packs no punch. … Crude oil buyers from all over Europe could have their banks wire payments to [bank X’s] account via the ECB’s large value payments sytem, Target2. [Bank X] could also open accounts for companies in India, China, and elsewhere who want to buy Iranian crude oil with euros.
… There is also the extreme possibility that the U.S. would impose travel bans on the ECB itself, in an effort to force ECB officials to remove [bank X] from Target2. Here is one such threat: “Treasury this week designated the governor of Iran’s central bank—does any European country think Treasury can’t designate their own central bank governor too?” Look, the idea of preventing Mario Draghi from travelling to the U.S., or blocking his U.S. assets, sounds so unhinged that it’s not even worth entertaining.
The reason Iran and its trading partners were not able to break sanctions between 2010 and 2015, according to Koning, is that Europe (specifically the German chancellor Angela Merkel) supported the U.S. administration and imposed its own sanctions on bank X, cutting it off the SWIFT and Target2 networks.