In a grey Brussels office building, not far from the Belgian capital’s Gare du Nord and red-light district, sits a company that handles transactions worth more than €1,100tn a year.
Euroclear, the central securities depository, operates a central part of the infrastructure of international finance, quietly settling cross-border trades and acting as a custodian of €42.5tn in assets, from corporate and government bonds to equities and derivatives.
It holds them on behalf of clients and settles trades when they are bought and sold, as well as paying out coupon payments and redemptions. But €185bn is frozen, the result of EU sanctions imposed on Russian sovereign assets in response to Vladimir Putin’s 2022 full-blown invasion of Ukraine.
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