By John O’Donnell
For more than four months, U.S. envoys delivered increasingly shrill warnings to Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank International RBIV.VI to scrap a deal they said had links to one of Russia’s most powerful oligarchs. In May, Washington’s patience snapped.
In a written ultimatum that landed on May 8 at the bank, its supervisor the European Central Bank and Austria’s government, Washington threatened to curb Raiffeisen’s access to the dollar, according to one person who has seen the letter, a potential death sentence for the biggest Western lender in Russia.
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