Aurelia Butler

Canada, the US and the UK want Aleksei Mozhin, Russia’s representative at the IMF, to relinquish or be stripped of his title as honorary head of the executive board of the multilateral lender, due to the invasion of Ukraine. According to people familiar with the matter, Canada first proposed that Mozhin give up the title of dean of the IMF board during a meeting on February 25, a day after Russia unleashed its attack. The US backed the effort during the same meeting and the UK is also supportive of his removal from the position, the sources said. The role of dean of the executive board — which Mozhin has held since 2015 — is a largely honorary title conferred to the longest serving member, which carries no official responsibilities or authority. The managing director of the IMF — currently Kristalina Georgieva — chairs the board and is responsible for calling meetings, setting the agenda and facilitating the discussion.

However, when the board is searching for a new managing director, or questions arise about a sitting one, as was the case last year when Georgieva was accused of manipulating data on behalf of China during her time at the World Bank — the dean steps in occasionally to speak for the board. For some IMF members, having Mozhin perform even those limited ceremonial tasks on behalf of the board in the wake of Russia’s assault on Ukraine has become unacceptable. “On an operational basis [the role] is kind of irrelevant,” said a former senior IMF official. “But these are unusual times and certainly the signalling aspect of not having a Russian be in that slot would be meaningful.”Mozhin did not respond to a request for comment on his intentions. He has shown no willingness to give up the title, people familiar with the matter said, and it is unclear whether there is a mechanism to remove him from the role or if there is enough support for that. The IMF declined to comment. The bid to strip Mozhin of his title is part of a broader effort by western nations and many others in the international community to isolate and punish Russia for the attack on Ukraine — from economic sanctions to condemnation within multilateral institutions. Within the IMF, a much more significant step would be to try to deny Russia its voting rights on the board, but this would require overwhelming support within the board as well as an assessment that Moscow had failed to meet its obligations to the Fund based on economic and financial criteria, which could be hard to prove. Russia’s share of voting power at the IMF is 2.59 per cent, compared with 16.5 per cent for the US. Meanwhile, some western IMF members have been weighing how to deny Russia the ability to convert $17bn in special drawing rights, a form of reserve asset issued by the IMF, into hard currencies like dollars, euros or yen, to circumvent the sanctions placed on its central bank. “The US is committed to taking all measures to prevent Russia from benefiting from its holdings of IMF SDRs,” a US Treasury official told the Financial Times, adding that Moscow “would face significant, even insurmountable, hurdles to use its SDRs”. “The United States and our partners, comprising the large majority of available counterparts in the IMF’s SDR transactions system, will not undertake SDR exchanges with Russia”. While handling Russia’s presence as an important IMF shareholder has been tricky for the Fund in light of the war, it has not been shy about expressing support for Ukraine. Georgieva this week joined David Malpass, president of the World Bank, in saying their institutions “stand with the Ukrainian people through these horrifying developments”, “are working together to support Ukraine on the financing and policy fronts and are urgently increasing that support”.Ukraine agreed to a $2.8bn IMF programme last November, after a testy time with the IMF pushing the Kyiv government to enhance the independence of its central bank and tackle corruption.The IMF declined to comment on the push to remove Mozhin as dean of the board. Mozhin first arrived at the IMF just after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 as an alternate executive director, becoming Russia’s main representative in 1996. In 2007, before becoming dean of the board, he spoke out publicly against the nomination of Dominique Strauss-Kahn to lead the Fund, saying he lacked the technical skills for the job. After Strauss-Kahn was forced to step down in 2011, Mozhin said that the IMF should abandon the convention of having its managing director be European. In 2018, while Christine Lagarde, the IMF chief at the time, was visiting Saint Petersburg, Russia, including a meeting with president Vladimir Putin, Mozhin took her on a tour of the city. More

(Reuters) – ZTE Corp (HK:0763)., the Chinese telecom equipment maker, will go back to U.S. federal court March 14 to face a new accusation it may have violated its probation from its 2017 guilty plea for illegally shipping U.S. technology to Iran.The possible violation relates to an alleged conspiracy to commit visa fraud, according to a March 4 court filing in a Texas federal court. An indictment unsealed last March charges a former ZTE research director in New Jersey and a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology with conspiring to bring Chinese nationals to the U.S. with J-1 visas, which are designed for work and study at institutions like Georgia Tech. After arriving the Chinese nationals went to work for ZTE in New Jersey, the indictment alleges.The professor, Gee-Kung Chang, has pleaded not guilty. The status of the ZTE research director, Jianjun Yu, is unclear. ZTE is not charged in the case.A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Georgia, where the visa case is pending, declined to comment.A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A lawyer for ZTE also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.If ZTE is found to have violated its probation, the ramifications are unclear. But in the past ZTE has faced massive fines and other penalties for running afoul of U.S. authorities.ZTE agreed to pay $892 million and pleaded guilty in Texas in 2017 to criminal charges for violating U.S. laws that restrict the sale of American-made technology to Iran and North Korea. A five-year investigation had found ZTE conspired to evade U.S. embargoes by buying U.S. components, incorporating them into ZTE equipment and illegally shipping them to Iran. Investigators also uncovered 283 shipments of telecommunications equipment to North Korea. At the time, ZTE agreed to three years of probation, a compliance program, and a corporate monitor. But in 2018, the U.S. Commerce Department said ZTE lied about disciplining executives tied to the wrongdoing and banned ZTE from doing business with U.S. suppliers. ZTE paid $1 billion and agreed to change its leadership and cooperate with a second 10-year monitor, among other terms, to get the ban lifted.The Texas judge also extended the company’s probation from the criminal case and the monitor for another two years, until March 22, 2022. More