A bill prohibiting participation in the activities of ‘undesirable’ foreign organisations will be supplemented by amendments that would enable Rosfinmonitoring to track all transfers to individuals and legal entities from countries listed in a special list.
According to “Vedomosti”, the initiative was put forward by Vasily Piskarev, head of the State Duma committee on security.
The amendments are provided for in the law on countering the legalization of proceeds of crime. They envisage removing the lower threshold, above which transfers by non-profit organisations fall under Rosfinmonitoring’s purview.
The agency will also be able to track receipts of transfers by individuals and legal entities in any amount if the funds originate from a foreign state on the ‘restricted-access’ list. Which countries will be on that list is not disclosed.
If the bill is passed, it would take effect on 1 October 2021.
The amendments have no direct relation to cryptocurrencies, lawyers interviewed by ForkLog say.
“Undoubtedly, these are transfers received through traditional means — bank transfers. To control transfers in cryptocurrency, a legislative cushion is needed. Having a single law on digital assets is not sufficient to enable such oversight,” said Andrey Tugarin, managing partner at GMT Legal.
He noted that cryptocurrency exchanges are obliged to check funds “for the presence of money-laundering activity and must ensure counter-terrorism financing.”
Lawyer and expert at Moscow Digital School Efim Kazantsev also believes that “these amendments will not affect the turnover of cryptocurrencies specifically.” According to him, “it is hard to imagine how Rosfinmonitoring would determine the country from which or to which cryptocurrency was sent”:
“Crypto wallets, unlike bank accounts, have no territorial ties to any country. And attempts to identify the parties to transactions by IP addresses are easily circumvented using anonymous proxies or VPNs.”
Nevertheless, indirectly the amendments could affect exchanges, said Eduard Davydov, partner at NOA Circle Russia:
“The bill concerns any funds, ‘originating from the territory of a foreign state’, where well-known crypto exchanges are located. The recipient of the payment may not know that the funds originated from foreign sources when filling out the withdrawal form from the exchange, and few pay attention to this.”
According to him, citizens will not know whether Rosfinmonitoring is monitoring a particular deposit to their bank accounts from a crypto exchange.
Earlier in May, the State Duma passed a law introducing administrative liability for failure to report transfers exceeding 600,000 rubles per year through foreign electronic wallets.
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