Luxembourg have frozen €210m of Russian assets held in Freeport

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The figure comes on top of the roughly €4.3 billion in Russian assets the country had already frozen, finance ministry said.

Luxembourg has frozen a further €210 million in sanctioned Russian assets stowed away in the country’s freeport, a fortress-like building at the airport where different tax rules apply, the government said on Monday, over 100 days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

It is the second time that the government has updated the total value of frozen Russian assets belonging to sanctioned Russian persons and companies after it said last week that Luxembourg banks and other financial institutions had frozen almost €4.3 billion.

The freezes take the overall value of blocked Russian assets in the country to close to €4.5 billion, the finance ministry told the Luxembourg Times – a sharp increase compared to the first figures which stood at €2.5 billion at the end of March – one month into the war.

By comparison, Switzerland has frozen €5.8 billion worth of Russian assets after the country released €3.3 billion more than had been provisionally blocked, the Swiss government said last month.

The finance ministry did not specify what kind of sanctioned assets kept in the freeport have been blocked in its reply to a parliamentary question posed by Green lawmaker François Benoy.