Restrictions on taking cash, gold out of Russia to be toughened, as demanded by practice - Central Bank

ST. PETERSBURG. Sept 23 (Interfax) - A presidential decree which imposed restrictions on the transportation of rubles in cash and gold out of Russia to countries in the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) as of April 1 will be toughened in the near future, because practice has called for this, head of the Central Bank of Russia's financial and currency monitoring service Bogdan Shablya said.

The decree prohibits private individuals from transporting to EAEU countries a sum of rubles exceeding the equivalent to $100,000 according to the CBR's latest exchange rate on a given date. From April onwards, legal entities and individual entrepreneurs are no longer able to take any currency out of the country, regardless of the sum. As of May, the decree also banned private individuals from transporting gold bars with a collective weight exceeding 100 grams out of Russia. The restrictions have several exceptions.

"In terms of Decree No. 193 [...] The decree truly is very important and very serious. It will also be, we hope, developed and revised in the near future, as practice shows that more order needs to be brought into this area," Shablya said at the International Banking Forum organized by the Association of Banks of Russia.

The presidential decree makes exceptions for instances when currency is being transported via international airports in Russia designated by the government, if they are accompanied by bank statements certified by the credit organization which issued them and confirming that the Russian rubles were withdrawn from bank accounts or deposits held by the private individuals, legal entities or individual entrepreneurs who are transporting the currency.

"For sums in excess [of the threshold set by the decree], confirmation documents are required -specifically, bank statements showing that the funds have passed through the banking system and were withdrawn from an account or issued as a loan or borrowing from a microfinance organization. In other words, the financial institution needs to conduct identification checks and verify the source of the funds. Why am I mentioning this? Because we encounter situations when the documents provided cannot always be fully verified. There are sometimes abuses -specifically in the cases we observe-where attempts are made to use the same documents to move multiple sets of cash out of the country," head of the Finance Ministry's Financial Policy Department Alexei Yakovlev said.

"Therefore, we, alongside the Central Bank and the Federal Customs Service, are aiming to set up a unified information system which would firstly make it possible to verify the authenticity of these documents and secondly to track instances of cash being exported using a specific document and prevent it being reused," he said.

Yakovlev told journalists that the planned amendments to the decree were aimed at raising operational efficiency. He did not comment on changes to the thresholds of the restrictions.

The current member states of the EAEU are Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.