...The focus in July has been on the potential effects of US and EU sanctions on Russia for EMEA corporates. We published a report analysing the impact of additional sanctions on Russian banks, corporates and the sovereign, which highlighted that US sanctions against specific Russian companies are negative, but not an immediate threat to corporate ratings. However, the additional sanctions announced in July may increase downside risk to growth and increase issuers' reliance on the domestic market for their financing. We also lowered our growth forecast for Russia to 0.5% in 2014 and 1.5% in 2015, mainly due to the impact of US and EU sanctions and rouble depreciation, and revised the Outlook on Russia's 'BBB' sovereign rating to Negative from Stable in March. BP and Total's credit ratings are unlikely to be affected by a possible further escalation of sanctions that cut off the dividend stream from their stakes in Russian energy companies or even expropriated the assets. However, an expropriation...
