12/18/2025December 18, 2025What is Euroclear and why is seizing assets it holds contentious?
Euroclear is a central securities depository (CSD) that holds assets like stocks and bonds, and helps facilitate their trade and payment across borders and in different currencies.
These financial instruments, sometimes referred to colloquially as “banks for banks,” underpin modern trading, not least of the securities used to fund borrowing by governments.
The Euroclear Bank in Belgium is its specific International Central Securities Depository (ICSD), responsible for handling cross-border non-domestic trade across the continent, as opposed to its national CSDs handling domestic trade in several countries. As such, it handles Russian assets.
According to Euroclear’s website, Euroclear Bank is “the premier provider of settlement and related securities services for cross-border transactions involving domestic and international bonds, equities, derivatives and investment funds.”
Euroclear also describes itself as “strictly risk averse.”
Belgium’s specific criticism of the plan to seize Russian central bank assets held by Euroclear is rooted in large part in liability concerns, with the country concerned it could be rendered legally liable for Russian investments all across Europe because of Euroclear Bank’s seat being located in Brussels.
‘It’s not our money to give away’
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The more broad warning voiced by some other governments and even the European Central Bank pertains to global confidence in investing in Europe. Countries like the Gulf states and China, which have small debt burdens and large international investment portfolios, hold large quantities of Eurobonds underpinning European government borrowing.
Falling confidence in these bond yields, or in the legal security of the funds, could lead to higher interest rates for national debt. This would cause pressure on government spending akin to the stress that threatened to bankrupt eurozone members like Greece and Italy and Portugal in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash.
So far, however, economists like Olena Havrylchyk say that the immobilization of Russian assets and recent discussions of giving them to Ukraine by some mechanism have not led to an increase in eurozone sovereign bond yields, despite the vocal critcism from Moscow and lawsuits launched by Russia’s central bank.
EU leaders debate ‘Ukraine Reparations Loan’ in Brussels
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