Council Regulation (EU) No 269/2014
The Council regulation of March 17, 2014 that freezes the assets of the persons and entities listed in its Annex I for undermining the territorial integrity, sovereignty or independence of Ukraine.
Council Regulation (EU) No 269/2014 is the EU asset-freeze instrument aimed at the persons and entities, listed in its Annex I, that undermine the territorial integrity, sovereignty or independence of Ukraine. The Council adopted it on March 17, 2014, the day after the referendum staged in Crimea, together with Decision 2014/145/CFSP (Common Foreign and Security Policy). The first Annex I listed twenty-one people: Crimean officials, Russian lawmakers, military officers. Eight years later the listing criteria widened to leading businesspersons operating in Russia, and Roman Abramovich went onto the annex on March 15, 2022, with Chelsea still up for sale. At the renewal of September 22, 2026, it covered more than three thousand persons and entities. The mechanism comes down to two prohibitions in Article 2: all funds and economic resources belonging to, owned, held or controlled by a listed person are frozen, and nothing may be made available to that person, directly or indirectly. The listed person is not the only target: a company it owns 50 percent or more of, or controls, is caught too, without appearing anywhere. Since the summer of 2022, Article 9 has required listed persons to report their assets to the competent authority, and silence counts as taking part in circumvention. Article 8 requires operators, insurers included, to report what they freeze. For insurance, the freeze catches the indemnity itself: a loss on a listed person's yacht or business jet is paid, if at all, into a frozen account, and premium collected from that person often requires a license. Derogations for legal fees, basic needs or prior contracts go through the national authority, in France the Treasury Directorate General. The regulation also has its own Article 11, which shuts out claims arising from a contract affected by the freeze.
Textbook case: a Maltese company, owned 60 percent by a person listed in Annex I and 40 percent by an unlisted partner, owns a yacht with hull cover of 18 million euros. A fire at the Genoa shipyard causes 3.2 million euros of damage. At 60 percent, the company is deemed owned by the listed person: the indemnity is a resource that would be made available to that person indirectly. The insurer therefore does not pay the 3.2 million to the owner; it reports it to the competent authority, and the shipyard can be paid from that sum only under a license. Had the unlisted partner held 55 percent and the listed person 45 percent, the question would have shifted to control, and the inquiry would have turned on the shareholders' agreement, not on the percentage alone.
Regulation 269/2014, EU Regulation 269, Ukraine territorial integrity sanctions, EU Russia asset freeze regulation, Decision 2014/145/CFSP, Reg. 269
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