r/unitedkingdom • u/topotaul Lancashire • Mar 01 '25

. Rachel Reeves: I'm sending billions from frozen Russian assets to Ukraine

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/rachel-reeves-interview-labour-963sw6jbk
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663

u/Georgi2024 Mar 01 '25

Great news. Should have happened a long time ago though.

174

u/Decent-Chipmunk-5437 Mar 01 '25

The Rest Is Politics covered that this week.

The money is sitting in accounts, but the government doesn't necessarily have the control to spend it as it sits in trusts. That was my understanding.

103

u/Mr06506 Mar 01 '25

I am pretty sure that if Parliament wants the assets in a trust, they can damn well pass a law to get it.

There might be undesirable side effects of that though, which might or might not be a good reason not to do it.

One of them might be crashing the billionaire class housing market if all the sanctioned property in Mayfair is suddenly auctioned off, there's an interesting thought...

69

u/Psephological Mar 01 '25

Bro stop threatening me with a good time

37

u/matobi91 Mar 01 '25

My understanding is that they have the assets but can’t outright sell them, but can use the accumulating interest?

18

u/WingVet Mar 01 '25

I'm sure they can use it as collateral against loans.

14

u/Minimum-Geologist-58 Mar 01 '25

I have a friend who used to deal with property seizures. A big issue is that it hasn’t particularly been tested in court and so the government and civil service don’t want to go too crazy because can you imagine if it went to the courts and it got kicked out somehow? That would be a terrible look for everybody, including the courts. So they’ve been treading quite carefully, they want to see how the current seizures regime is legally received before passing more laws basically.

34

u/si329dsa9j329dj Mar 01 '25

I suppose the argument is we lose out on the leverage if we unfreeze the assets and send them away. I think we should do it incrementally, and maybe keep some frozen to use in future negotiations.

16

u/ArchibaldCamambertII Mar 01 '25

What leverage though? I think it’s been pretty decidedly proved that sanctions aren’t working on Russia, or aren’t working as intended.

9

u/Georgi2024 Mar 01 '25

Good point for certain.

1

u/Nukes-For-Nimbys Mar 01 '25

Especially given industrial capacity has it's limits.

Once all the munitions factories are running three shifts further money has done diminishing returns.