Foreign minister hopes courts will allow seizure of foreign state property in Russia

ST.PETERSBURG, June 19. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday he expects that the country’s courts will allow the arrest of foreign property with the state participation on the Russian territory.

"I hope that our courts will announce decisions that will allow the Russian state to arrest foreign property on our territory and namely those states that act like this with us," Lavrov said adding that this concerns "property with state participation."

The minister said  Russia is preparing lawsuits on the arrest of European property with public ownership.

"Our economic operators are going to submit a request to the Russian court in response to illegal actions against them - to take similar steps in Russia to arrest the property of foreign companies with public ownership," Lavrov said.

He noted that reciprocal actions would be a response to the seizure of Russia’s accounts. "This is inevitable, this is the way one should act on the international scene. Reciprocity can be both positive and negative. In this case it will be negative," the minister said.

Lavrov noted that Russia was seeking, above all, the abolition of the seizure of the accounts of the Russian diplomatic missions.

"In France, they too, began with the seizure of the accounts of the embassy, the UNESCO mission, the trade mission, then they seized only the accounts of Russian companies with public ownership. In Belgium, repeating the same unlawful situation, they announced the seizure of the accounts of our diplomatic missions - the embassy, the missions at the EU and NATO," he said.

Lavrov added that all this "absolutely ran counter to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations." "Representatives of the Belgian Foreign Ministry have told us they were unaware of the incident that they have an independent judicial system. These explanations are not accepted," the Russian Foreign Minister said.