LONDON (Reuters) -BlackRock’s iShares will close its MSCI Russia and MSCI Eastern Europe exchange-traded funds because of the Ukraine conflict, BlackRock said on Friday.
BlackRock suspended the funds shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which Moscow calls a “special military operation”, on Feb 24.
“Due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, normal market trading conditions have remained materially impaired, and a significant portion of Russian securities are still not currently tradeable for non-Russian foreign investors,” BlackRock said in a statement.
BlackRock said it believed it was acting in the interests of shareholders by closing the funds.
BlackRock said Russian securities would remain in the funds “until such time as it is possible, practicable and appropriate, in the manager’s view, to liquidate each of the positions in an orderly and managed way”.
IShares said in separate regulatory statements that it would delist the funds from the London Stock Exchange on or around June 22.
(Reporting by Carolyn Cohn, editing by Karin Strohecker and Philippa Fletcher)
