Obviously Banks don't hold physical assets in the bank itself, but they hold assets as in shares, accounts for Gold and silver in vaults, deeds to property loans and so on. You'd be surprised what the Australian govt knows too, a family member of mine used to work monitoring criminal activity in a large Australian casino, a lot of global criminals are banned from even walking in the front door. I'm well aware of how criminal syndicates work, I've friends and family that also work high up in AFP and state police.
We'll wait and see how much effect the sanctions have.
I think you've missed what I was trying to say about those sanctions. It's got less to do with any of the things you mention and more to do with not allowing people access to the US financial markets, which generally require you to actually hold a US bank account or transact via your country's banks correspondent banking accounts, which russian banks transact trillions worth of transactions yearly.
A correspondent bank is effectively a proxy for you or another bank in a country where you or that bank don't have an established banking relationship. Usually there is a handful of accounts that deal in billions of dollars of transactions a day. Removing access to these facilities mKes it hard for people to continue to use established routes for wealth creation (legitimate and suspect alike)
Reconciling these accounts is notoriously hard and a great way for concealing the origin or true source of funds. It's standard for large legitimate companies in different jurisdictions sending each other money through these channels so finding the odd sus transaction relies on software to flag it. However these softwares are fallible and different banks tune them differently based on their risk appetites or local regulatory requirements. Knowing that information is key to stay undetected. It's also not a matter of just adjusting the tuning to pick up the sus transactions either, because instead of say 2 or 3 redflags a day, a small change could create thousands of false positives a day.
And I do t think I'd be surprised what the govt does know, because I am exceptionally familiar with how these systems work. I have tuned and audited these transaction monitoring systems for multiple big 4 banks.
I also know that It falls to the organisations to report the information to the govt. The govt doesn't have a direct view of the banks various ledgers directly. They get reports from the bank with this data and it is often sanitised. This is one of the reasons that these things do go on and why stuff like banks still copping fines for thousands of AML breaches still occurs. Banks set their appetites, tune rules for detection, review samples and report any thing they do find that's suspicious to AUSTRAC.
Sometimes Austrac works out that the banks aren't giving the full picture so they come in and audit them. AUSTRAC is also exceptionally smart at filling in the blanks, but they just don't have the resources to be on top of everything all the time.
