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Russia's huge sovereign wealth fund will also be pressed into
action, spending up to 1 trillion roubles ($10.3 billion) to buy
shares in Russian companies, a government decree showed,
confirming an earlier report by Reuters.
"In the current sanction situation foreign entrepreneurs are
forced to be guided, not by economic factors, but to make
decisions under political pressure," Prime Minister Mikhail
Mishustin told a governmental meeting.
"In order to give business a chance to make a considered
decision, a presidential order was prepared to impose temporary
curbs on exit from Russian assets," he said, without giving
details.
Russian authorities are hurrying to respond to increasingly
harsh sanctions imposed by Western nations since Moscow invaded
Ukraine last Thursday.
The measures range from curbs on the central bank's ability to
use its gold and foreign exchange reserves to the exclusion of
big Russian banks from the international financial system.
On Monday, a plunge in the rouble to all-time lows forced the
central bank to hike its key interest rate to 20% and ask
exporting companies to sell forex to support the currency.
Global companies which have operated in Russia for decades have
said they will halt investments, including BP and Shell,
shareholders respectively in Russia's top energy company Rosneft
and Sakhalin 2 LNG plant.
Mishustin said Russia was "open to dialogue with
constructively-minded investors" and that: "We expect that whose
who invested into our country will be able to work here further
on."
On Tuesday, Connecticut Treasurer Shawn Wooden said he would
direct the U.S. state's pension funds to sell Russian assets,
for moral reasons and to reduce investment risk in the state
retirement funds, worth more than $47 billion in all.
Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a "special operation"
designed not to occupy territory but to destroy its southern
neighbour's military capabilities and capture what it regards as
dangerous nationalists.
The Institute of International Finance (IIF), a trade group
representing large banks, has warned that Russia is extremely
likely to default on its external debts.
With Moscow's battered stock market closed for a second day on
Tuesday, Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman, who has been
sanctioned by the European Union, warned that exiting Russian
assets might prove difficult even without the temporary ban.
"I don't think we would be able to divest assets in Russia right
now because there are no buyers for the time being," Fridman
told reporters in London.
(Reporting by Moscow Newsroom; Editing by Catherine Evans)
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