Banks of the Russian Federation were banned from transferring data on customers to foreigners

The State Duma has adopted a law that prohibits Russian banks to transfer bank secrets of account owners with foreign bodies. It is hacked to transfer data on operations, customer representatives, beneficiaries and beneficial owners of accounts.

Amendments will be introduced to the law on counteracting unfriendly countries, the author of the bill became the Russian government. Now, in the case of a request for information about account holders in Russia from foreign law enforcement agencies, banks will only be able to inform about the ban. They will also be required to quickly transfer all requests received to the Central Bank of Russia.

The regulator, in turn, will have to transfer information about requests to the federal executive bodies (they include both the government itself and the FSB and the SVR of Russia).

The explanatory note to the project says that it must be adopted so that unfriendly countries could not use their laws encroaching on the banking secret of Russian account holders. In particular, we are talking about the USA.

The bill was submitted to the State Duma back in June last year. As the Deputy Minister of Finance of Russia Alexei Moiseev explained, a law was adopted in the USA that requires "all organizations working with the American currency to answer all questions related to the actions of any of their customers - individuals and legal entities."

“Accordingly, the Americans consider it possible to disconnect everyone who will not respond to this request from working in US dollars. The government has decided to answer this American measures of a countermer,” Moiseev said.

At the same time, the US legislation remains unchanged - the United States will still be able to impose sanctions on banks for refusing to provide bodies with information about dollar account holders on request. The ban will also affect all other countries that the Russian authorities recognized as unfriendly due to the imposition of sanctions, despite the lack of similar laws.