Brussels must present a device which will allow you to grasp some of the yachts, villas and other bank accounts of the more than a thousand personalities and Russian oligarchs referred to by European sanctions to date.
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Should Russian assets be confiscated that sanctions against Moscow have made it possible to freeze within the European Union (EU) since the start of the war in Ukraine? While the country is a little more destroyed every day under the assault of the Kremlin, they could help, when the time comes, to finance its reconstruction. Wednesday, May 25, the Commission must make a first contribution to this reflection, as legally as politically. It must indeed present a device which will make it possible to grasp some of the yachts, villas and other bank accounts of the more than a thousand personalities and Russian oligarchs to date targeted by European sanctions.
“It is already possible to confiscate the goods of the persons put under sanction which we see that they were, moreover, condemned for a criminal activity, such as money laundering”, notes Didier Reynders, the European Commissioner to justice. To identify them, we must cross the list of Russian personalities under sanctions and that of the European Office for Police Cooperation (Europol). “A few weeks ago, when some 600 Russians were under sanction, we found 150,” he continues.
Furthermore, judges the committee, since the twenty-seven decided, unanimously, to take sanctions against the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, as well as many others Oligarchs and their families, they must consider their violation as a crime. Today, within the EU, only twelve countries have made it a criminal offense (Denmark, France, Croatia, Cyprus, Latvia, Luxembourg, Hungary, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Finland, Sweden), which ‘accompanies with a substantial sentence. The others provide for relatively low or even negligible fines.
“You must harmonize laws”
In this context, the community executive proposes to include the violation of sanctions in the list of “Eurocrimes” identified by European treaties, alongside terrorism, the trafficking in human beings, the sexual exploitation of Women and children, illicit drugs of drugs or weapons, money laundering, organized crime, computer crime and the counterfeiting of means of payment. Consequently, the member states will have to make it a criminal offense.
This decision of a new Eurocrime must be taken unanimously by the twenty-seven. A simple formality, wants to believe the commission, which does not imagine Hungary, despite its proximity to the Kremlin, opposing it, since it voted the first five packets of sanctions. But on February 4, when France proposed, after the assassination, in October 2020, of Professor Samuel Paty, that the “speech of hatred” was also a “Eurocrimime”, Budapest had put his veto, arguing that it was its national sovereignty.
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