Perhaps a naive question, but: Aren't you able to open an account (in Scandinavia) with Unicredit, using a reference from your Russian client (and perhaps with a help of their Russian branch which can be asked for it by your partner)? If your partner is a top-tier customer of Unicredit Russia, I can imagine that it may work...
Actually, we contacted Unicredit during the summer and they had zero interest to work with us and provide an account for our company. Maybe if you have big big business, they might help you out, but for us, the answer was strict no, even with the recommendation from the other party. They are also trying to sell their Russian operation, so probably makes sense for them not to onboard any new high-risk clients if they try to erase Russia from their portfolio.
Yeah, no doubts they don't want to deal with crypto and want to send via swift transfer in their preffered currency (in your case this is EUR.) That's how mostly russian companies do.
Now tell me please, have you asked them directly whether they accept to make an addendum to the agreement that money will be sent in EUR via swift transfer to an in intermediary company who acts on your behalf as an agent? Look, in this situation intermediary is your financial institution same as your bank. It's like they woudn't accept you to chnage a financial institution. I suggest to talk to them again in details.
The only thing they care about is that the recipient of the money is our company. They recently made a change to the agreement, that we could also accept money through some payment service providers " transfer of funds can be carried out using the Payment Service Provider" but unfortunately they still do not accept some third party companies (for example my friend's company) in Russia to accept the money and send it to us. The third party needs to be an actual payment service provider, for example, something like PayPal.
Stay away from them. The trick is they appoint a local director (a citizen of Georgia or Armenia) and the bank accout will be opended by him. Then he will "resign" and legally speaking you need to inform your bank that you are the owner. If you do so, your account will be closed. If you won;t inform you will risk that your assets will be frozen as soon as the bank got to know that company is run by non resident.
Yeah, this is what legit lawyers told me when I visited Yerevan.
BTW, what about India or even LatAm? (If you are trading something, it does not mean that the goods must go physically through the concerned country...)
Will think about it, there are definitely some countries that could be interesting (the ease of opening a business and bank account).
From all I read here Turkey and Dubai would be one of the destinations I would choose if I were in your place. It is not just to place your business somewhere, it is like you need some sort of stable places and where you can find trusted people.
I've been thinking about Dubai (also relocating there) but after hearing the horror stories from people involved in trade with Russia and trying to open company bank accounts, I will wait and see how the situation develops. I'm not Russian myself so I don't really care about the aspect of the language but the truth is that it is much easier to do business with Russia from CIS countries or Turkey, than it is from Western or even middle-eastern countries. Georgia seems quite in between for now. They have so much money coming in from Russia and the government likes it, so I guess the banks have to play along a bit too, even though almost every bank has denied us so far (have business accounts in two banks currently).
