The European Commission is pressing ahead with its plan to give Kiev up to €3 billion ($3.2 billion) from profits generated by frozen Russian assets amid waning financial support from the US, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.
Brussels is fast-tracking the decision to seize the interest earned from the assets held at clearinghouse Euroclear, starting from February onwards, the article stated. A first tranche of money could be sent to Kiev as early as July if Brussels can secure the approval of all bloc members, the outlet said, citing EU officials. The proposal is reportedly expected before a summit of EU leaders next week. The West has frozen roughly $300 billion in holdings belonging to the Russian central bank since the start of the Ukraine conflict two years ago. Brussels-based clearing house Euroclear holds around €191 billion ($205 billion) of them and has accrued nearly €4.4 billion in interest over the past year. According to the report, Brussels would disburse between €2 and €3 billion in revenue generated by frozen assets this year, depending on interest rates. EU officials estimate that overall profits derived from Russian funds held by Euroclear could reach €20 billion by 2027, the FT said. The issue of tapping Russian assets has grown in importance since a $60 billion American aid package to Ukraine was blocked by the Republican-led US Congress, prompting Kiev to look for alternative donors to fund its war effort. The European Commission is pressing ahead with its plan to give Kiev up to €3 billion ($3.2 billion) from profits generated by frozen Russian assets amid waning financial support from the US, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday. Brussels is fast-tracking the decision to seize the interest earned from the assets held at clearinghouse Euroclear, starting from February onwards, the article stated. A first tranche of money could be sent to Kiev as early as July if Brussels can secure the approval of all bloc members, the outlet said, citing EU officials. The proposal is reportedly expected before a summit of EU leaders next week. The West has frozen roughly $300 billion in holdings belonging to the Russian central bank since the start of the Ukraine conflict two years ago. Brussels-based clearing house Euroclear holds around €191 billion ($205 billion) of them and has accrued nearly €4.4 billion in interest over the past year. According to the report, Brussels would disburse between €2 and €3 billion in revenue generated by frozen assets this year, depending on interest rates. EU officials estimate that overall profits derived from Russian funds held by Euroclear could reach €20 billion by 2027, the FT said. The issue of tapping Russian assets has grown in importance since a $60 billion American aid package to Ukraine was blocked by the Republican-led US Congress, prompting Kiev to look for alternative donors to fund its war effort.
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NATO could face a serious risk of the US leaving the alliance if Donald Trump is re-elected in November, the Telegraph said on Saturday, citing several diplomats from the bloc’s member states.
Europe’s NATO countries should develop some strategy to deal with the consequences of such an eventuality and reconsider the bloc’s defence capabilities, they warn. The possibility of America’s withdrawal is a “concern,” one European diplomat told the paper. “Nobody knows what he’s going to do next,” he said, referring to Trump. The former president secured his leadership in the Republican primaries earlier this week as he swept 14 out of 15 states at stake on Super Tuesday and got 995 Republican convention delegates’ votes. His only opponent, Nikki Haley, dropped out of the race for the GOP nomination soon thereafter. He is now expected to face off against President Joe Biden in November since the incumbent American leader also came out on top in the Democratic primaries. Earlier, several former senior US officials claimed that a Trump White House could make America withdraw from NATO. Former US Défense Secretary Mark Esper made such a prediction in December 2023. According to him, Trump could start pulling US forces out of NATO countries, potentially causing “the collapse of the alliance.” Reuters also reported on such a possibility at that time. In mid-February, Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, made a similar statement. “NATO would be in real jeopardy,” he said, adding that Trump “would try to get out.” A European diplomat said that the rest of the bloc should “do the planning” for a scenario in which Trump follows through on such plans or just weakens America’s commitment to NATO. “Preparations need to be in place,” the paper’s source added. Another official described NATO as “so overdependent on the US.” A “discussion” on hedging against risks of a US withdrawal was “necessary,” this person added. A third source quoted by the paper said European nations should check the adequacy of their own “defence planning” amid such risks. In the UK, similar concerns were previously voiced by Lord Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to the US and a prime minister’s national security adviser. “If I were an official in any prime minister’s office around Europe, I would be commissioning the experts in government to start doing some contingency thinking about how a NATO without the United States would look and function – just in case,” he said in a piece he wrote for Prospect last month. Trump himself has not made any comment lately about leaving the alliance. Instead, he said in February that he would not “protect” those NATO members that fall short of the 2% spending threshold in case of an attack, including by Russia. Speaking at a campaign rally in South Carolina on February 10, he recalled what he described as a conversation with “the president of a big country” in Europe. When allegedly asked whether he would rush to the nation’s aid in case of an attack by Moscow, Trump said that if this nation hadn’t spent enough on defence, he “would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want” to it. Moscow itself has repeatedly denied any plans to attack a NATO member, adding that starting a global war would go against “common sense.”
It's not every day that an arcane European Union initiative goes viral online. But last Friday turned out to be that day thanks to French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire exporting his frustration with the slow progress of the bloc's capital markets union (CMU) project straight to social media with an online clip that has since amassed more than 8.5 million views.
Now, a whole host of online channels are circulating the French-language clip, in some cases in AI-enhanced dubbed English, as proof that the EU is bankrupt and that Brussels is on the verge of raiding Europeans' savings, sparking critiques and memes. At issue is Le Maire's contention that a capital markets union would give authorities the “ability to mobilize all of Europeans' savings, some €35,000 billion worth, to finance the climate transition, fund our defense efforts, and invest in artificial intelligence.” Some, such as Arnaud Bertrand — a tech entrepreneur whose posts frequently fetch over 1 million views on X (formerly known as Twitter) — alleged Le Maire was “straight out declaring that Europe has run out of money” and signaling EU leaders’ intent to use Europeans' bank deposits to fund public spending, including on aid to Ukraine. But that's not quite what's happening here. The real point of the CMU is to create a single market for investment in the EU — one where people can invest across borders easily, much as they do across states in the U.S., while also benefitting from scaled-up services. So, rather than having 27 national pension schemes, under the vision consumers could pay into a pan-EU one. And, rather than navigating different tax regimes across EU countries, people could invest abroad in the EU as easily as they can in their home country. European companies, meanwhile, would be able to access financing from the whole of the EU, rather than being forced to list in the U.S., as German company Birkenstock did last year to Brussels' embarrassment. The key confusion with the online reaction to Le Maire's rant is that requisitioning savings is not on anyone's agenda. The CMU, as it stands, is intended to be entirely voluntary. What's more, even those in EU policy circles believe Le Maire's bark is worse than his bite in pushing for the project. Le Maire expressed equally bombastic language to reporters. “I’m fed up with discussions. I’m fed up with empty statements. Do you really think that China and the U.S. will be impressed by our statements? We need decisions,” he told reporters as he entered Friday's meeting of European finance ministers in Ghent, Belgium. However, given the glacial progress on the initiative to date, some of the French frustration might be justified. The EU has wanted a single market for capital since close to its inception, while the European Commission has been trying to regulate a CMU into existence since revealing a dedicated action plan nearly a decade ago. Today's reinvigorated push for action is a function of the EU struggling to keep up in an increasingly competitive landscape. Unlike the U.S., the bloc can't easily throw huge sums of money at green industrial policy via an Inflation Reduction Act-style act. Nor can it match China's aggressive state support for key industries like solar panels and chip manufacturers. Meanwhile, the importance of meeting green and digital transition goals has upped the urgency of unlocking private investment alongside public funds. This is especially the case now that governments, in the wake of unprecedented levels of EU public spending to prop up the economy during the Covid-19 pandemic and during the energy crisis that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, are having to tighten their belts. For now, the EU is working on moving the CMU along at different levels. Finance ministers plan to sign off on a political statement with their priorities for the project next month, and former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi is working on a report about the EU’s competitiveness. The Commission, on its part, has put forward legislation on listing and retail investment with the aim of making capital flows across the bloc more simple. But Le Maire’s argument is that none of this is enough, and if the EU tries to move forward with 27 countries on board, the CMU will never get done due to the complexity. Instead, he wants a smaller group of countries to move forward with cross-border projects to speed up investment. Nonetheless, at the Ghent summit, officials involved in the drafting of the Eurogroup statement and deputies from national ministries gave a resounding eye-roll to Le Maire’s latest outburst, knowing that behind closed doors he is far more cooperative. France’s finance ministry, meanwhile, isn’t too worried about the naysayers. Speaking to POLITICO, one spokesperson said the CMU project is “clear and credible” and France will keep working on it. “For those who have questions, we are open to discussion to make it understandable,” they added. Scared of being abandoned by the US under Trump, European officials are floating the idea of the bloc’s own nuclear force.
With its farmers rebelling, its economy declining, and its traditional parties decaying, you’d think the European Union has enough to worry about at home. Yet its thoroughly detached elites love to think big. And what’s bigger than nuclear weapons? That’s how they have ended up falling for one of Donald Trump’s typically blunt provocations. The former – and likely future – American president has warned that NATO members not spending enough on defence won’t be able to count on US protection on his watch. Eminently sensible – why do declining but still comparatively wealthy EU states keep behaving like defence beggars? – Trump’s threat has triggered various predictable meltdowns. The White House archly tut-tutted about the “appalling and unhinged” rhetoric of a man who is not, unlike the current president Joe Biden, overseeing a genocide together with Israel. Go figure, as they say in the US. On the other hand, many Republicans have displayed demonstrative insouciance, if not outright agreement. And that is certain to reflect what many ordinary Americans think as well; that is, if they think about Europe at all. And as if the Big Scary Orange Man hadn’t done enough damage yet, next came the Pentagon, which (sort of) revealed that Russia – that famous gas station sending out its shovel-wielding soldiers to capture German washing machines – is building, if not a Death Star, then at least something equally sinister out there in space: Sputnik déjà vu all over again, as America’s greatest philosopher might have said. All of that, of course, against a background of incessant NATO scaremongering, which, it seems, has succeeded in spooking NATO most of all. No wonder then that inside EU-Europe, reactions to Trump’s taunting sally have been marked by serious abandonment anxiety. One of its symptoms has been a call for the bloc – or Europe’s NATO members; the issue is fuzzy – to acquire its own nuclear force. One way or the other, Christian Lindner, Germany’s minister of finance, made time from razing the state budget in an economy that his cabinet colleague, the children’s book author and minister of the economy, Robert Habeck, has just labelled “dramatically bad,” in order to pen an article calling for France (not subordinating its nukes to NATO) and Britain (not even in the EU anymore) – two small nuclear powers – to step in as the new security sugar daddies by expanding their nuclear umbrellas over everyone else. Katarina Barley, eternally fresh-eyed vice president of the European Parliament and the top EU election candidate of the German Social-Democrats – a party leading a deeply unpopular government while approaching extinction in the polls – and Manfred Weber, head of the conservative faction in the European Parliament, have kept things more general: They simply suggest that the EU should get its own doomsday weapons, somehow. Donald Tusk, freshly re-established as Poland’s EU-subservient viceroy, has made similar noises. Well, who cares about details, right? That attitude of “on s’engage et puis on voit” has, after all, proven a smashing success in Ukraine. In reality, this is not a problem caused by Trump: That, in a world of more than one nuclear power, the US nuclear umbrella over any place other than the US itself is – and can only be – fundamentally unreliable is, of course, a perennial, structural problem. Those who prefer realism to wishful thinking have always understood this. Henry Kissinger, for instance, a sinister yet sometimes brutally frank practitioner of realpolitik, explained as much as early as the 1950s – perhaps most succinctly in a television interview in 1958 – just a little over a decade after the dawn of the nuclear age. If any clients abroad were to be attacked so severely or successfully that only a US nuclear strike would be left to respond, any American president – whatever treaties are in place or promises have been made – would always face an impossible choice: Drop the client or suffer a retaliatory strike on America itself. It is true that various policies have been devised to mitigate this dilemma (“limited” nuclear war, nuclear sharing, or the NATO medium-range missiles of the 1980s), but, in reality, it cannot be resolved. Yet here we are. An EU that seems to suffer from historical amnesia produces chatter about a search for nukes of its own. Not the nukes that are already in US-aligned Europe anyhow, in the national arsenals of France, Britain, and at American bases in five NATO countries, so that, at least, we are already used to them, but different nukes, new nukes. Nukes the acquisition, politics, and rules of which are all still to be figured out. What could go wrong? Everything, really. But let’s be a little more detailed. First of all, the elites of EU-Europe have, expectably, immediately displayed disunity and confusion. In essence, while no one meant the call for nuclear weapons as a challenge to the US, it was still too much for hard-core Atlanticism compradors: Germany’s minister of defence, Boris Pistorius, NATO’s figurehead General-Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, and the head of the German parliament’s defence committee – and “jokingly” “Volkssturm”-nostalgic (no kidding) – uber-hawk Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann all scrambled to contain the inadvertently mildly subversive idea that Europe could possibly try to do anything significant on its own. Perish the thought! A house so divided against itself is not a safe place to own nukes. Secondly, nuclear weapons are, of course, meant for extreme emergencies, means of last resort either to serve deterrence by the threat of we-will-take-you-with-us retaliation when all is lost anyhow (the purpose of Britain’s and France’s arsenals) or, at best, in a situation of imminent, catastrophic defeat. One implication of this fact is that the decision to use them would end up with either one person or a very compact group hunkered down in a bunker. Who would that be in the case of the EU? The head of the commission, for instance? Someone like Ursula von der Leyen, a self-promoting, short-sighted, and reckless power-grabber, free of any electoral legitimacy, who is really serving the US and not Europe? Good luck! And how would the EU overcome the fact that any such ultimate decider would also have national allegiances: An Estonian or a Pole perhaps, from states, that is, that have their own risky agendas and, to be frank, national(ist) complexes? Or someone from Spain or Greece perhaps, from, that is, countries that may well largely escape the direct effects of a large-scale fight in central Europe, and therefore would have no sane incentive to have Madrid or Athens incinerated to make a last point about Latvia or, indeed, Germany? Set up a committee (unanimity rules or majority voting on when to push the very last red button?), and all you will get is a multiplication of clashing and divided loyalties. Thirdly, more generally, can you imagine today’s EU – or anything growing out of it – in possession of weapons of mass destruction? That is, a club of states most of which are now stubbornly complicit (International Court of Justice be damned) in an ongoing genocide in the Middle East (committed by Israel against the Palestinians), many of which have a pathological obsession with crusading against Russia, and none of which can even grasp that the greatest threat to their sovereignty comes from their “allies” in Washington. And that leads us to the final and most fundamental problem: This whole debate about nukes for Europe is based on bizarrely blinkered premises that betray that EU-Europe is by far not politically mature enough to have such weapons (if any state ever is). Because if it were, then its strategists and politicians would honestly acknowledge and discuss one simple fact: A nuclear force would have to deter every possible vitally dangerous opponent, that is, of course, including the US. Yet these are the same leaders that have simply ignored that the greatest act of war, eco-terrorism, and vital-infrastructure demolition against the EU – the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines – was launched by Washington, whether hands-on or via proxies. The EU is a large bloc of countries in an increasingly unstable and lawless world where the ever-wider proliferation of nuclear weapons will be inevitable. Hypothetically, such an entity would be a candidate for owning such weapons. Yet, in reality, the EU lacks three essential qualities to even consider acquiring them: It is far too fractious, it has no serious concept of its own interests as apart from and, indeed, opposed to the US, and it lacks an elite that could remotely be trusted with weapons capable of ending the world. There, it is of course, not alone. But isn’t one US on planet Earth bad enough already? For more than seven decades, a secretive and highly influential organization has been bringing together the heads of Europe’s largest banks twice a year at luxury hotels and royal palaces across the continent to discuss global policymaking among other issues, according to a report by the Financial Times on Monday.
The article highlighted that the existence of the Institut International d’Etudes Bancaires (IIEB) is barely known outside its membership while the group has no website and its meeting agendas are not made public. Members are reportedly discouraged from sharing details of the discussions. “This is not like Davos, where anyone can buy their way in,” one longtime member told FT on condition of anonymity. “This really is exclusive,” he added. Some members have been complaining about lack of transparency within the group, which was set up to encourage closer ties among banks at a time of geopolitical tensions and challenges to financial stability across Europe. “We were members for decades when the organization served a purpose to bring European banks closer together,” Par Boman, the chair of Swedish bank Handelsbanken, told the FT. “But after the financial crisis we felt its extravagance and lack of transparency did not fit our values.” According to the report, the IIEB was established in Paris in 1950 by the heads of four lenders from across the continent – Crédit Industriel et Commercial, Union Bank of Switzerland, Société Générale de Belgique and Amsterdamsche Bank. The aim was to hold regular high-level discussions on developments in the banking sector, as well as the economy and monetary system. The topics under discussion reportedly reflected the concerns of European bankers at certain periods of time. In the 1950s, for example, it was the formation of subsidiaries in former colonies, while by the 1960s, the attention had turned to the global role of the US dollar, the problems with the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates and the threat of American takeovers of European banks. Towards the end of the century, the IIEB discussions were more concerned with the impact of the euro, the growing derivatives market, and M&A deals between big banks, the FT wrote. “As Europe’s lenders come under pressure to improve their lackluster valuations – having fallen far behind their US rivals on profitability in recent years – and with the continent bracing for a long-heralded wave of cross-border dealmaking, the IIEB is entering one of its most important periods since it was set up in the aftermath of the second world war,” the paper wrote. According to the FT, besides being a forum where Europe’s top financiers can exchange ideas, the IIEB serves as an elite social club where, over three days, the bankers’ spouses can enjoy gala dinners, private tours of historic landmarks and high-end shopping trips. The report noted there has been almost no media coverage of the IIEB’s activities during its more than seven decades of existence despite the importance of the topics under discussion.
Similar rallies were held across Poland in January. A separate protest by another group of farmers and truckers blocking a key border crossing with Ukraine saw Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government capitulate to the protesters’ demands, which included reinstating a permit system for Ukrainian truckers, adopting government subsidies for Polish corn, and a moratorium on tax hikes. Last Thursday, the European Commission proposed extending the suspension of customs duties on agricultural goods from Ukraine and Moldova through 2025. The measure was originally scheduled to expire this year. Thousands of farmers from across the bloc descended on Brussels ahead of that summit, throwing eggs, rocks, and fireworks at the EU Parliament building and setting huge piles of manure on fire.
EDITORIAL: Von der Leyen celebrates ‘a great day for Europe’ as farmers protest in Brussels3/2/2024 “Agreement! The European Council delivered on our priorities. Supporting Ukraine…. A good day for Europe,” tweeted unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Thursday, as EU farmers “high-fived” her by throwing eggs, lighting fires and dumping manure in Brussels, where a reported 1,300 tractors had gathered in protest.
Surely it must have been in anticipation of this “great day for Europe” that Brussels rolled out the barbed wire to keep the bloc’s own struggling farmers at bay while its leaders cut yet another check for Ukraine — after threatening the one anticipated holdout with national economic “blackmail,” as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban qualified it. It’s hard to believe that this meeting actually took place in Brussels. These officials are so disconnected from reality that it may as well have been held on a whole other planet. Unlike the Ukrainian products making their way onto Western European dinner plates to stick it to Russian President Vladimir Putin (because turtlenecks and short, cold showers apparently failed to do the job), this crisis is certifiably EU-made. No one knows this better than the farmers, who also realize that it makes more sense to blockade the streets of Brussels than the national highways of their home countries, which they’ve been doing with overwhelming public support – from nine out of every ten citizens in the case of France, according to a recent Odoxa poll. It was the EU with its climate change obsession that imposed a Common Agricultural Policy on farmers across the entire bloc, managed by bureaucrats divorced from the reality on the ground. Pencil pushers use EU Copernicus satellite images to spy and crack down on farmers whose paperwork doesn’t match – even if any discrepancies can be chalked up to uncontrollable but temporary conditions like the weather. It was also the EU that piled on regulations under the pretext of ensuring the quality of farm products, while at the same time flooding the bloc with grain, poultry, and other imports from Ukraine. Does “Chernobyl chicken” mass-produced by workers who are paid a pittance represent a threat to the physical health of citizens and economic health of farmers? If not, then why can’t Brussels take its jackboot off the necks of its own farmers so they can compete on a level playing field? The EU has also suddenly decided to ease up on some pesticide bans, angering greens. Paris is promoting the idea that ideologically-driven bans need to end, which seems like a tacit admission of their uselessness. So what should we be more worried about now – ideologically-driven authoritarianism under the guise of health consciousness, or an actual health threat? And what about that Ukrainian grain that EU officials demanded Russia unblock to feed the poor in developing countries? It turns out that Turkey and Russia were right when they raised the alarm about it just being dumped right next door in Europe, and it sounds like Russian President Vladimir Putin was effectively a bigger defender of EU farmers’ interests than Brussels was. But who’s even surprised anymore by Brussels’ misplaced priorities, given the image that has now emerged of another €50 billion ($54 billion) going out the door to Kiev, in support of a country that’s undercutting the EU’s own farmers without even being in the EU itself? It was also the EU that screwed itself, its entire population, industry, and farmers out of cheap Russian energy, driving inflation that caused consumers to turn to cheaper food products and, in turn, driving industrial distributors to buy more cheaply, favoring Ukrainian imports. French President Emmanuel Macron said that he’d now be merciless with those industrials, as he limbers up to toss them under the tractors instead of taking responsibility for his own inaction or blaming Brussels for a top-down anti-Russia policy that’s doing far more harm than good. The farmers’ problems are existential. And while some French farming union chiefs have called for the suspension of blockades in light of the most recent series of promised reforms announced by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, it’s not clear whether the rank and file will actually listen in the long term. These are people who don’t talk much, but when they do, they’re direct and concrete. As one farmer told me, “Our feet may be in the dirt, but the dirt is clean” – in contrast to some politicians who have different narratives depending on their audience. Even with the suspension of the blockades on Friday, union reps admit that if government action and implementation doesn’t follow shortly, then the blowback from the same farmers risks being “catastrophic.” For many farmers I’ve spoken with, it’s far too little, and way too late. The average French farmer’s income, estimated by government statistics back in 2021 at around €17,700 a year (for people who regularly work 70 hours a week), has since been subjected to even more blows. Yet governments have insisted on milking this particular cow until there’s nothing left. How else to explain the careless decision to raise taxes on farm fuel by 3 cents a liter, every year, and the insistence on maintaining such a policy at a time when the price of energy had skyrocketed as a result of knee-jerk anti-Russian ideological choices imposed by the EU? Until the tractors spilled onto the highways in France, Paris showed no interest in reversing this tax policy, which was implemented to drive the “green transition” away from conventional energy, and against all pragmatic reality. Clearly French officials knew of its devastating impact, as it was one of the very first concessions that Attal tried tossing like a speed bump in front of the advancing tractors on January 26 – and which the farmers rolled right over, demanding more. Then there’s Queen Ursula briefly breaking from her fawning over the EU farmers’ current nemesis, Ukraine, to propose easing their “administrative burden.” Too bad she didn’t do that before letting Ukraine into the market in the first place. Guess she could always just blame Putin for making her do it. The bureaucracy is so overwhelming at this point that her proposal to the farmers is like offering to save people drowning in the ocean by tossing them a bucket. She could have stopped the paperwork pile-on at any time, but didn’t. And how exactly could she know this demagoguery was killing European farming? You’d think that the first clue would have been the fact that EU policies ended up strong-arming Dutch farmers to sell their land to the government because their cattle’s nitrogen emissions exceeded climate policy limits. Macron has now started to lobby the EU to restrict Ukrainian imports. Wow. You’d think these tractors were Decepticon Transformers about to rise up and kick their behinds, the way that all these EU leaders are suddenly springing into action. But the fact that an elected president even has to go cap in hand to plead with unelected Brussels bureaucrats, rather than make sovereign decisions in the best interests of his own country, is pathetic. Like, what if they say no? Then what? Does Macron think that he’s going to single-handedly and permanently derail the new Mercosur free trade deal, ready for signature, and set to flood the EU with even more farm products from Brazil and the rest of South America? If Macron, or any other EU leader had any courage, they would have vetoed the €50 billion for Ukraine and demanded that it be used in consultation with EU farmers to ease their burden and “unscrew” the bloc. That’s a lot of bought time for the EU to figure out how to deconstruct the mess that it has made of its own house through corruption and special interests – all in hope that one day, people doing honest work can also make a commensurately decent living. The Hungarian government is in favor of Sweden joining NATO and will soon schedule a ratification vote in the parliament, Prime Minister Viktor Orban announced on Wednesday.
The move will allow Stockholm to become a member of the US-led military bloc after almost two years of delays. Sweden applied to join NATO in May 2022, citing the Russia-Ukraine conflict, but ran into opposition from Türkiye and Hungary due to ongoing disputes with the two states. The bloc’s rules require unanimous consent before it can accept new member states. “Just finished a phone call with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg,” Orban said on X (formerly Twitter). “I reaffirmed that the Hungarian government supports the NATO membership of Sweden. I also stressed that we will continue to urge the Hungarian National Assembly to vote in favor of Sweden’s accession and conclude the ratification at the first possible opportunity.” Budapest has accused Stockholm of telling “blatant lies” about Hungarian democracy as part of an ongoing dispute within the EU. As of Wednesday, the Hungarian parliament has not put up the ratification vote on its docket. Turkish lawmakers voted to approve Sweden’s membership on Tuesday, sending the ratification bill to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s desk. Ankara had serious differences with Stockholm over human rights, terrorism, and arms trade, which interfered with NATO plans to have Sweden and Finland join the bloc together. Both Scandinavian countries abandoned their longstanding policy of non-alignment after Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine, citing it as a threat to their security. When Finland officially joined the bloc in April 2023, NATO doubled the length of its border with Russia. Moscow stated that it had no issue with either country until then, but would have to react if they join NATO. Russia has insisted that the bloc’s expansion eastward, which began in 1999, is a threat to Russian national security and one of the root causes of the Ukraine conflict. Orban has repeatedly called for peace in Ukraine and said he would block any attempts by Kiev to join NATO or the EU, as that would mean “bringing the war” into both blocs. The European Union has put together a preliminary agreement that includes a €10,000 cap on cash payments to address the challenges posed by money laundering and the financing of terrorism.
The accord, reached through negotiations among member states and the European Parliament this week, seeks to protect citizens and the EU financial system from illicit financial activities. However, the proposed legislation raises privacy concerns and fears of state surveillance and government control over how people spend their money, as well as potential abuse of the new powers. The newly established regulations will impose the cash payment limit on entities engaged in financial services, banking, real estate agencies, asset management firms, casinos, and merchants. Moreover, these entities will be obligated to verify the identity of individuals making cash payments within the range of €3,000 to €10,000. While member countries have the flexibility to set lower limits for cash payments, the interim agreement introduces a heightened focus on monitoring high-net-worth individuals, a provision advocated for by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). In an expansion of the scope of oversight, the interim agreement now encompasses a significant segment of the cryptocurrency sector. Crypto service providers will be required to authenticate customer identities for transactions equal to or exceeding €1,000. Beginning in 2029, the regulatory framework will be extended to include professional football clubs and agents, which will be categorized as obligated entities. This classification mandates these entities authenticate customer identities, monitor transactions, and promptly report any suspicious money transfers to the financial intelligence services of their respective countries. The agreement empowers member countries to exclude football clubs and agents from their national lists if they are determined not to pose a risk. National financial intelligence services and other competent authorities will gain access to information on ownership, bank accounts, and land and property registries. These authorities will also supervise the transfer of ownership for specific luxury goods, setting thresholds at €250,000 for cars and €7.5 million for yachts and aircraft. The impending implementation of the new legislation has ignited a robust public debate, exposing a diverse range of viewpoints. Heightened apprehensions surrounding potential totalitarian surveillance, especially with exemptions for high-profile individuals, evoke disquieting parallels to Orwell’s ‘1984’ and intensify fears of a dystopian reality. Skepticism has been cast on the effectiveness of these regulations, prompting queries about their ability to genuinely combat money laundering and fostering calls for a more inclusive strategy that addresses the burgeoning cryptocurrency sector. Conversely, some interpret the EU’s cash payment cap as a positive stride toward meeting the needs of the contemporary economy. They acknowledge the evolving financial landscapes and the digitization of cash flows, including the growing influence of central bank digital currencies. However, there are those who condemn these measures as excessive state control. The ongoing discourse reflects a polarized perspective on the EU’s actions, encapsulating concerns about potential abuses of power and the necessity of adapting payment methods to contemporary needs. This debate underscores the intricate dynamics between financial regulations, surveillance, and individual freedoms in the digital age. |
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