MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday gave the green light to investment bank Goldman Sachs to offload its Russian subsidiary, a highly symbolic departure amid the Western corporate exodus.
The US bank, which was hired by the Kremlin in the 1990s to help attract foreign investors, announced plans to leave Russia in March 2022, just days after Moscow launched its full-scale military offensive on Ukraine.
Hundreds of Western companies have exited the country since, most selling at cut-down prices amid counter-sanctions introduced by Moscow to punish those seeking to leave.
Putin signed a decree on Friday authorising the sale of 100 percent of the shares of Goldman Sachs’s Russian unit to Balchug Capital, an Armenia-based investment firm.
There were no details on the terms of the deal.
Under Russia’s rules introduced amid the wave of corporate exits, firms quitting the market have to sell at a write-down and pay an exit tax to the Russian government.
The departure of Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s top investment banks, is a marker of how Russia’s economy has been cut off from the West in the three years since it ordered troops into Ukraine and was hit with a barrage of sanctions.
The US bank was first hired by then Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1992, just months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to help the country court foreign cash.
