Is withdrawing cash from a broker in margin in Europe prohibited?

External question — Personal Finance Stack Exchange Author: user1721135 Original post: https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/162210 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. Since about 2 years its impossible to simply withdraw cash from interactivebrokers in Europe on margin. You can buy more stock on margin, but you can't withdraw cash. Is this something regulatory related and what do they try to achieve here? Also will I break IB rules or regulations by using any of the obvious workarounds, such as: Sell everything, withdraw what I need, buy back everything I had with the rest of the money + margin Short a stable stock, withdraw money, close position About a year ago I had this problem and did the short selling method. I put in the transfer and immediately closed my position and it worked. Now it seems IB wants you to keep the short position open until they actually transfer the money. They seem to be working trying to prevent what I am trying to do, but I don't understand how it makes sense, after all I can at least use method one. What is the point in this regulation and am I risking my account with these methods? Also which of the two is better? I just need 5k from my 300k account which has 15k margin loan already.