February 27 (SeeNews) - Romania will initiate procedures to withdraw from the International Investment Bank (IIB), a multilateral institution in which Russia is a shareholder, following Russia's military invasion of Ukraine, the government said.
The decision is part of a series of actions undertaken by a special taskforce responsible for managing the consequences of Russian aggression in Ukraine, the government's spokesman Dan Carbunaru said in a live-streamed press conference on Saturday.
On Friday, the Czech Republic's finance ministry called on EU states that are members of the IIB and the International Bank for Economic Co-operation (IBEC) to withdraw from the two organisations. The Czech Republic is accelerating the termination of its IIB and IBEC membership, the finance ministry said in a social media post on Friday.
In the past seven years, the volume of Romanian lei funding attracted by IIB amounts to 2.3 billion lei ($520 million/ 465 million euro), according to latest information made available by the bank.
The IIB was founded in 1970. Its shareholders include Bulgaria, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Mongolia, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Vietnam. In 2019, IIB moved its headquarters from Moscow to Budapest.
(1 euro=4.9479 lei)