The U.S. Treasury Department said it would remove sanctions imposed on Bereke Bank when it was a subsidiary of Russia’s Sberbank, QazMonitor reports.
"This is due to the fact that the bank has changed its owner and is now fully owned by the national management holding Baiterek, whose shareholder is the Government of Kazakhstan,” bank officials explained.
Bereke Bank expects the sanctions to be lifted as early as March. This would enable the bank to resume work with currency operations and correspondence with foreign banks.
Sberbank sold its Kazakh branch to Baiterek NUH in early September of last year after which the subsidiary was renamed Bereke Bank. The application to lift the sanction was sent in the same month.
The transaction was done with the assumption that a change in shareholders and rebranding would remove the bank from the SDN (Specially Designated Nationals) sanctions list.
So far, the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control has extended the deadline for the completion of the transaction involving Bereke Bank until March 31, 2023.
Earlier, Bereke Bank Chairman Andrei Timchenko said that the bank could be removed from the SDN List by the end of February 2023.
"We were told that there will be no problems with the removal of sanctions since we no longer have anything to do with Sberbank of Russia," he said.
