MILAN (Reuters) -UniCredit faces a second court case in Russia linked to guarantee payments the Italian bank was not able to honour due to Western sanctions imposed on Moscow after it invaded Ukraine in early 2022, it said in its half-year report.
UniCredit controls Russia’s 15th largest bank by assets and is embroiled in another court case in Russia over guarantee payments its local subsidiary could not honour because of the sanctions regime.
The Italian bank has been under pressure from the European Central Bank to speed up its disengagement with Russia but UniCredit has turned to the European Court of Justice over the demands because it is concerned that complying could lead the group to breach Russian laws.
On June 26 a St Petersburg court ordered UniCredit to pay 448 million euros in a lawsuit over a scrapped gas project that triggered guarantee payments UniCredit could not make because of the sanctions.
In addition to that, UniCredit said in its half-year report that its Russia subsidiary AO Bank had sued the group’s German unit UCB in a Moscow court.
AO Bank had issued a guarantee package in favour of a Russia company and had reinsured the scheme with the German part of the bank.
Once it paid the Russian corporate client, AO Bank sought to claim the counter-guarantees it had agreed with UniCredit in Germany, but the latter withheld the payment due to sanctions.
After a preliminary hearing on June 14, the Moscow court has set the next hearing for the third quarter, the bank said.
(Reporting by Valentina Za, editing by Alessandro Parodi and Elaine Hardcastle)
