Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) pulled a controversial debt swap deal with sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska at the last minute on March 21 that would have allowed it to repatriate €650mn of earnings trapped in Russia, the Financial Times reports. The Vienna-based banking institution had been gearing up to offload €650mn of ‘additional tier 1’ (AT1) bonds, a form of debt designed to absorb losses in times of financial distress, which had attracted over €1.6bn in investor interest. The decision to withdraw the bond issue came shortly before the pricing was finalized after…