ECB fines Russia’s Sberbank over risk exposure

The EU’s top banking supervisor said Monday it had fined Russian lender Sperbank’s European arm 630,000 euros ($714,408) for breaching limits on risk exposure.

“The European Central Bank has imposed an administrative penalty… in respect of breaches of the large exposure requirement,” the Frankfurt institution said in a statement published shortly after markets closed on the continent.

Sberbank Europe AG, an Austrian subsidiary of Russia’s largest consumer bank, had breached a rule limiting maximum risk linked to one client or group of clients to 25 percent of a lender’s capital, the ECB said.

The Russian bank has two months to appeal the decision, the supervisor added.

The ECB has only recently begun to swing the stick of fines against the major financial institutions it has supervised since 2014 and a post-crisis overhaul of EU banking rules, beginning with an 11.2 million euro punishment for Italy’s Banco Popolare di Vicenza in 2017.

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