Some Russian companies have faced increasing delays and rising costs for payments with trading partners in China. Transactions worth tens of billions of yuan remain in limbo.
Reuters writes about this regarding interlocutors, reports Ukrinform.
It said Russian companies and officials had pointed to transaction delays for months after Chinese banks stepped up compliance following Western threats of secondary sanctions over their dealings with Russia.
According to sources, the problem has worsened this month. In particular, Chinese state-owned banks are “massively” suspending operations with Russia, and billions of yuan in payments are being delayed.
China is Russia’s largest trading partner, accounting for a third of Russia’s foreign trade last year. China supplies goods such as critical industrial equipment and consumer goods that help Russia withstand Western sanctions.
China also provides a lucrative market for many of the Russian exports that Beijing relies on, from oil and gas to agricultural products.
After the US Treasury Department threatened banks in China and other countries with secondary sanctions for cooperation with the Russian Federation in June, Chinese banks began to take a very strict position regarding transactions with Moscow, the interviewer of the publication notes.
“Then all cross-border payments to China stopped. We found a solution, but it took about three weeks, which is a very long time, and during that time the volume of trade dropped sharply,” he said.
According to him, one of the working solutions was to buy gold, transport it to Hong Kong and sell it there, depositing the cash in a local bank account.
In addition, some Russian companies used chains of intermediaries in third countries to process their transactions and bypass compliance checks by Chinese banks.
As a result, transaction processing costs have increased to 6% of transaction fees, while previously they were almost zero.
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