This is hugely late but as the guy who created Citibank in Moscow, the answer is that there are two ways a bank can operate in a foreign country - as a Branch or as a wholly-owned subsidiary.
In the case of Russia, the Russian government allowed only wholly-owned subsidiaries because they wanted us to deposit our capital with them rather than rely on our offshore capital which would be the case for a Branch.
So Citibank T/O was created with $15 Million in capital in 1994. It is now much much bigger of course.
