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Kazakhstan Limits Outflows Of Hard Currency, Gold Amid Russia Sanctions

By RFE/RL's Kazakh Service March 14, 2022

NUR-SULTAN -- Kazakhstan has limited flows of hard currency and gold out of the country amid an ongoing economic downturn in neighboring Russia after Moscow was hit with sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine.

President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev signed a decree on March 14 banning people from taking more than $10,000 worth of foreign currency out of the country in cash. The decree also banned taking gold bars out of the country.

The decree was signed after a sharp drop in the Kazakh national currency, the tenge, which lost more than 20 percent of its value since the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions on Russia for the invasion, which began on February 24.

Many banks in the tightly controlled Central Asian country, along with those in Armenia, Belarus, and Kyrgyzstan, all members of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, have stopped giving clients their money in U.S. dollars, citing a shortage of the currency.

Last week, Russia's central bank announced that citizens with foreign-currency accounts would not be allowed to withdraw more than $10,000 until September 9 and that banks could no longer sell hard currency.

In early March, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an executive order banning people from taking more than $10,000 of foreign currency out of the country in cash.

The West's sanctions have cut off major Russian banks' access to the dollar and other reserve currencies and severed some of Russia's leading banks from the SWIFT global-payments-messaging system.

Sanctions have also blocked Russia's central bank from using much of the country's sizable reserves to protect the economy, while many Western companies have exited the Russian market because of the invasion.

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/kazakhstan-stops- currency-gold/31752657.html

Copyright (c) 2022. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.