How did Ottoman subjects navigate shifting notions of citizenship and national belonging that also affected their economic assets in the wake of World War I? Based on a case study of sequestered Istanbul electricity company shares in a Belgian consortium, held by a company owned by a Greek citizen of the Ottoman Empire, I argue that the interwar practice of holding individual citizens and private companies financially accountable for their governments’ wartime actions reveals the economic consequences of nationalist ideologies based on the assumed homogeneity of populations. Much has been said about the violence of states on their minority populations during the transition from empires to nation-states, however, scholarship on the role of international financial institutions in enacting the homogenizing logics of the emerging nation-state system is still emerging, especially for the First World War and interwar periods in the Middle East. Through analyzing the sequestration process and the shareholder’s struggles to get his company’s shares back, I show how the logics of capital and nation-state were negotiated on a micro level between banks and companies in the Ottoman Empire and Europe.