Background
Sberbank Europe AG, headquartered in Vienna and wholly owned by Russia's Sberbank, ran a retail network across central and south-eastern Europe. Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, and the sanctions that followed, destroyed confidence in the group overnight: depositors withdrew funds at a pace no liquidity buffer could absorb, and the bank's access to funding markets closed.
The moratorium
On 28 February 2022 the ECB determined that Sberbank Europe AG and its subsidiaries in Croatia and Slovenia were failing or likely to fail due to the deterioration of their liquidity. To buy time for an orderly outcome over the following days, the SRB imposed a moratorium suspending payments — the first use of the pre-resolution moratorium power introduced by the 2019 banking package.
Three entities, two outcomes
The decisions of 1 March 2022 split the group. For the Croatian and Slovenian subsidiaries, the public interest test was met — both were significant in their local markets — and the SRB applied the sale-of-business tool: Sberbank d.d. in Croatia was transferred to Hrvatska poštanska banka, and Sberbank banka d.d. in Slovenia to NLB d.d. Customers of both banks kept uninterrupted access to their deposits. For the Austrian parent, whose deposits were mostly covered and whose functions were judged substitutable, resolution was not in the public interest; it entered Austrian insolvency proceedings and its depositors were repaid through the deposit guarantee scheme.
Why the case matters
Sberbank Europe was the framework's first geopolitical stress test and its first live use of the moratorium tool. It also demonstrated group resolution in practice: the public interest assessment is made entity by entity, and a single group can simultaneously produce resolutions in some member states and an insolvency in another — all executed inside a week, without public funds.