Moscow, March 30 - "Vesti.Ekonomika" The scheme for transferring capital abroad using writs of execution from various courts has become one of the main topics of discussion recently. At the same time, there is no ready-made solution to the struggle.
At the moment, it is not even clear whether legislation will need to be changed in order to stop such schemes.
Moldovan scheme
The withdrawal method received its name simply because it was based on falsified court decisions issued by Moldovan district courts.
The essence of the scheme is the conclusion of fictitious transactions between two companies, which are usually offshore, and the guarantors were citizens of Moldova with the guarantee of Russian shell companies.
Then the company and the guarantor refused to fulfill the obligation, so Russian companies created specifically for this had to pay, and such decisions were made by the courts in Moldova en masse.
Total from 2011 to 2014 Using this scheme, $22 billion were withdrawn, according to data from Rosfinmonitoring, but in 2015 figures of $50 billion were also cited.
More than 100 Russian companies participated in the scheme, and money was transferred to the UK, New Zealand and Belize.
But this scheme was closed two years ago, the Bank of Russia discovered it in 2013. Of the Moldovan banks, Moldindconbank was most involved, and of the Russian banks, 23 banks participated in the scheme, including the Russian Land Bank, Baltika Bank, "European Express", "Smartbank", "Mast Bank", "Intercapital Bank", banks "Zapadny", "Energobusiness". Among foreign banks, Danske Bank, Bank of China, HSBC and UBS were also involved.
Fraudsters are constantly trying to come up with various schemes for withdrawing capital from the Russian Federation, since the usual methods quickly cease to work or become no longer so effective.
Until 2010, the most popular scheme was with fictitious imports, but after the improvement of methods for controlling the movement of goods, it lost its meaning.
Now calling the current withdrawal scheme “Moldavian” is not entirely correct, although the meaning has hardly changed. Now it is also based on court decisions and the actions of the Federal Bailiff Service (FSSP).
Usually, to implement this method, two legal entities are needed, one of which must be Russian, the other foreign. After filing a lawsuit to collect debt from a company in Russia, the latter agrees to the demands. Therefore, the court fully satisfies the claim, the money passes through the FSSP, and then ends up in an account in a foreign bank.
In fact, this is not only a withdrawal method, but also a laundering method, since for foreign regulators the money is absolutely “clean”, since it went through the FSSP.
Over the last year alone, about 16 billion rubles were withdrawn in this way, according to the Bank of Russia, and this is about 10% of the total volume of dubious transactions.
Over three years, using fictitious transactions, about 1 trillion rubles were withdrawn, the Accounts Chamber noted.
Combating such schemes is not so easy, since from a legal point of view, a scheme involving the FSSP is legal and protected. Russian courts, confirming the decision of their foreign colleagues, can only consider the issue from a procedural point of view, that is, cancel it only if the procedure is violated. Therefore, in most cases there is no reason to overturn the decision.
Therefore, earlier, the head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, asked at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin for help in combating such methods of withdrawing funds. After this, a meeting of the interdepartmental working group on combating illegal financial transactions was held under the leadership of Presidential Aide Yevgeny Shkolov.
According to Deputy Director of Rosfinmonitoring Pavel Livadny, the most correct thing would be to amend the legislation so that a representative of Rosfinmonitoring is invited to such court hearings.
Then the court will be able to use the basis for refusing the claim due to “violation of public interest,” he believes. And the deal will be recognized as imaginary. The prosecutor can exercise such a right if he participates in this process, writes Reuters.
But the problem of decisions by courts of foreign jurisdiction still remains. They cannot investigate the essence of the transaction, since they are obliged to recognize decisions of courts of foreign jurisdiction. And this is already work for the authorities and relevant bodies, which will have to achieve changes in the contractual framework between the countries.
A separate issue is the issue of fictitious decisions of arbitration courts, but in this case Rosfinmonitoring expects a rapid improvement in the situation due to changes in the relevant legislation.
At the same time, the final bill will be adopted in about a year, although this could happen faster, given “the complexity of the issue and the need for a prompt solution,” Livadny added.
Global banks were involved in a money laundering scheme from Russia. According to The Guardian, British investigators had questions for representatives of HSBC and Barclays. It is believed that suspicious transactions were carried out through these and 15 other UK financial institutions. Money was withdrawn from Russia according to the so-called “Moldavian scheme”. With the help of this mechanism, a total of more than $20 billion “flowed” out of the country. How did it work? Will the largest banks have to answer for capital flight from Russia? About this - in the material of Elena Zharikova and Yulia Koshkina.
“Laundromat” is not only a self-service laundry, but also a way to easily “launder” $22 billion. This is the name given to a large-scale scheme to withdraw capital from Russia through Moldovan banks.
The mechanism was revealed two and a half years ago. At least 20 Russian credit institutions were involved in it. Among them are the Russian Land Bank, European Express, Western and Baltika banks.
It turned out that there is no more reliable cover for the withdrawal of funds than the court. To carry out the laundering operation, two offshore companies were created. One promised the other to pay a large sum of money, but then refused to repay the debt. The borrowing company had a nominal guarantor from Moldova, from whom they began to demand money through the courts. As a result, Russian companies saved him by transferring money abroad from their bank accounts.
The scheme worked flawlessly for four years and covered more than 700 credit institutions in 96 countries. Global players also carried out dubious transactions: HSBC, Barclays, UBS, Bank of China.
It is unlikely that the largest banks directly participated in the scheme. But if supervisory authorities find out that credit institutions have lost their vigilance, the latter will have to pay serious fines, noted FBK Legal partner Alexander Ermolenko: “Laundering implies that some kind of crime was committed somewhere, and as a result of this, some money. At the entrance it is even more or less possible to check, understand what kind of money it is, where it came from. After this money gets into a bank account, it is already “white” money, and then, moving from bank to bank, it is already quite difficult to track the original origin of this money. "In general there is regulation that banks have to act according to - if they haven't checked they will be punished."
More than 5 thousand companies in different jurisdictions received money from Russia, mainly in Denmark, Hong Kong, China and Cyprus. In Moldova alone, ten criminal cases have been launched regarding money laundering, with bankers and judges under suspicion. In Russia, an investigation is also underway, but specific suspects have not been named.
Novaya Gazeta, which conducted its own investigation, on Monday named the names of the beneficiaries of the “Moldovan scheme.” Among them are businessman Alexey Krapivin, close to Russian Railways, owner of the Lanit group Georgy Gens and co-owner of the Marvel IT holding Sergey Girdin. All of them denied their involvement in dubious transactions.
Hundreds of companies from Russia could have used the “Moldovan scheme”; it is unlikely that it will be possible to find all those involved in the withdrawal of assets, says Mikhail Alexandrov, partner of the A2 law office. “I don’t think there are one, two, three or five people behind all the money. As a rule, such volumes indicate that it was just a service, a money withdrawal business. Of course, this business had organizers who earned something from it, interest from these 22 billion, which is also a lot. It is theoretically possible to identify such persons. This scheme, of course, had clients who transferred this money. How much sense it makes to pursue them is a big question, because they may not even know how all this money was spent,” says the lawyer.
Reuters previously reported that Russian FSB officers may be involved in the Laundromat scheme. That is why the investigation cannot be completed - Russian law enforcement officers are interfering with the work of their Moldovan colleagues. However, Moldovan President Igor Dodon later stated that no one was throwing a spoke in the investigators’ wheels.
The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs has already commented on the information about the involvement of British banks in money laundering from the country. Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Igor Zubov said that Great Britain has long been considered a safe haven for “criminal capital.” According to him, Russian law enforcement officers have repeatedly told their British colleagues about this.
The three largest Russian beneficiaries of the scheme for withdrawing money from the country with the help of illegal decisions of Moldovan judges (the so-called “Moldovan scheme”), the volume of which is estimated at 700 billion rubles ($22 billion at current rates), were businessman Alexey Krapivin, whose companies are the largest contractors of Russian Railways, owner of the Lanit group Georgy Gens and co-owner of the Marvel IT holding Sergey Girdin. These results of a joint study with foreign journalists are reported by Novaya Gazeta, which published a series of materials on this topic.
As reporters found out, 700 billion rubles did not have a single source. The common pot, which journalists called the “Laundromat,” received money from major government contracts, from the smuggling of electronics, clothing and military products, from the theft of assets in banks, and even from the financing of political projects in Europe.
Novaya Gazeta journalists report that they used the well-known investigative principle “follow the money.” Thus, reporters found out that in the period from 2011 to 2014, two companies from Belize and Panama (Redstone Financial Ltd. and Telford Trading S.A.) received $277 million, or about 8.4 billion rubles. Almost all the funds came from fictitious offshore companies, in favor of which Moldovan bailiffs wrote off money from Russian bank accounts.
Novaya Gazeta discovered Redstone Financial Ltd. and Telford Trading S.A. in the “Panama archive” - documents from the law firm Mossack Fonseca, which an unknown source leaked to the Sueddeutsche Zeitung last year. According to the Panama Papers, the only beneficiary of both companies (and therefore of the money that went into their accounts) was Alexey Krapivin, an influential Russian businessman.
The companies of Krapivin and his partners are the largest contractors of Russian Railways. Krapivin's father was previously an adviser to the former head of Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin. And by coincidence, the Krapivin family during this time managed to build a huge holding of construction and design companies that received hundreds of billions from Russian Railways, journalists point out.
According to Reuters, many of the companies that were part of Alexey Krapivin’s holding were registered to dummies. And the money received from Russian Railways was not spent on construction or the supply of goods, but was transferred to shell companies, and then cashed out or transferred to offshore companies. Data on transactions for Krapivin’s companies was obtained by Reuters from the secret database of banker German Gorbuntsov. A copy of this database is at the disposal of Novaya Gazeta.
Gorbuntsov fled Russia in 2010 after threats that began to come from his former partners. In 2012, an attempt was made on his life in London, but the banker miraculously survived. Gorbuntsov was a co-owner of two banks - STB and Incredbank. It was these banks that provided services to Russian Railways contractors who, according to Reuters, were associated with Alexey Krapivin.
The movement of money through the accounts of these contractors from 2005 to 2009, indeed, shows that in many cases tens of billions of rubles from Russian Railways were not spent on government projects, but were transferred to companies with signs of one-day operations. These companies transferred money to each other for the most absurd reasons (for example, for the purchase of Lego construction sets), and then transferred them to offshore companies.
Alexey Krapivin did not respond to Novaya Gazeta’s request and did not explain whether the funds received by his companies through Laundromat were of state origin.
Another line of investigation by Novaya Gazeta shows that in 2013-2014, a company from the British Virgin Islands, Comptek International Overseas, received $27 million, or 931 million rubles, into its account in the Swiss bank UBS AG. The funds came from the same fictitious offshore companies for whose benefit Moldovan bailiffs wrote off money from Russian bank accounts.
Comptek International Overseas was also serviced by Panamanian registrar Mossack Fonseca. In their correspondence, Mossack Fonseca employees wrote that the owner of Comptek International Overseas was Georgy Gens. This is the owner of the Lanit group, one of the largest IT companies in Russia and a distributor of Apple, Samsung and Asus products.
The state can be considered one of Lanit’s largest clients. According to Novaya Gazeta’s calculations, over the past few years, firms included in the group have received government contracts worth at least 51 billion rubles. Georgy Gens did not respond to Novaya Gazeta’s request.
In addition, between 2011 and 2013, a company from the British Virgin Islands, Zymbeline Trading, received almost $96 million, or 2.9 billion rubles, into its account at the Swiss bank UBS AG. The money came from the Moldovan bank Moldindconbank and the Latvian Trasta Komercbanka. These funds were transferred to fictitious offshore companies, in favor of which Moldovan bailiffs wrote off money from Russia.
Documents regarding Zymbeline Trading are also in the Panama Archives. In 2008, the manager of the company's bank account was Sergey Girdin. Novaya Gazeta was unable to clarify whether he controlled the company’s account later, when money was transferred to it under the “Moldavian scheme,” and Girdin himself did not respond to Novaya Gazeta’s request.
Girdin is the honorary consul of the Republic of Guinea in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region, as well as a co-owner of the Marvel IT holding with a turnover of several tens of billions of rubles.
One of Marvel's major clients is the state-owned Sberbank. Over the past few years, Marvel has concluded government contracts worth more than 7 billion rubles.
The principle of operation of the “Moldovan scheme” Novaya Gazeta explains in another article today using an old example. In January 2011, a company from the UK, Valemont Properties Ltd. allegedly purchased the bill from another UK company, Goldbridge Trading Ltd. The face value of the bill is $400 million. The guarantors for the bill were several companies from Russia, including the Legat company, nominally registered in the name of a Russian pensioner (with his consent - for money), and a citizen of Moldova. When the time came to pay off the bill, all payers (Goldbridge Trading, Russian companies, and a citizen of Moldova) reported that they recognized the debt, but they had no money. And then the company Valemont Properties in April 2012 applied to one of the courts in Chisinau at the place of registration of the citizen of Moldova, whose role was precisely to ensure Moldovan jurisdiction, where the organizers of the scheme had good connections. At the end of April 2012, the judge, who, according to Moldovan media reports, is now under investigation, ruled to recover $400 million in favor of Valemont Properties.
After this, the bailiff got involved in the case. She sent letters to the banks of Moldova with a demand to forcibly collect funds from debtors if their accounts were found on the territory of the republic. Everything was provided for: correspondent accounts of the Russian MAST-Bank and Intercapital-Bank were opened in the Moldovan Moldindconbank, in which the Legat company was serviced. Having received a court order, Moldindconbank employees forcibly collected funds from correspondent accounts of Russian banks to pay off the fictitious debt of this company. Once in the accounts of the Moldovan bailiff in the same bank, Russian rubles were converted into dollars and transferred to the account of the British company Valemont Properties.
Media: FSB officers could withdraw $22 billion through Moldova
Moldovan intelligence services suspect that FSB officers may have created an organization that siphoned $22.3 billion through Moldova's financial system between 2011 and 2014, four official Moldovan sources said.
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) published a new investigation into the withdrawal of about $21 billion from Russia. RBC looked into how the criminal scheme worked, affecting 732 banks in 96 countries.
On March 20, the international Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and Novaya Gazeta published a new journalistic investigation into an alleged Russian money laundering scheme through Moldova and Latvia, which they called the Laundromat. The scheme operated from at least 2011 to 2014, and during this time, according to OCCRP, about $21 billion was withdrawn from Russia (700 billion rubles at the average exchange rate of those years).
When did you learn about this scheme?
Back in 2014, OCCRP and Novaya Gazeta wrote about Laundromat, calling it the largest money laundering operation in the history of the CIS. At the same time, journalists revealed the amount laundered over four years ($20 billion), outlined the scheme by which the alleged fraudsters worked (fictitious loan agreements between foreign shell companies, Russian and Moldovan guarantors, “forced” to repay a non-existent loan), and named the main participants in the fraud - Moldovan Moldindconbank and Latvian Trasta Komercbanka.
What new did the journalists learn?
Laundromat received money from various sources: government contracts in Russia (corruption through inflated prices), theft of assets in Russian banks with revoked licenses, possible tax evasion, investigators say. Money passed through the laundromat could be used to purchase goods and services from companies such as Samsung and Ericsson, and even to finance pro-Russian organizations in Eastern Europe. The money withdrawn from Russia went to accounts in 732 banks in 96 countries, and was received by more than 5 thousand companies from various jurisdictions - from the USA and South Africa to China and Australia, Novaya Gazeta writes.
The publication also claims that it has even identified several “Moldovan schemes” — the final recipients of the money (although in reality the users of the scheme could be hundreds of people and companies). These are businessman Alexey Krapivin, whose companies are contractors of Russian Railways (he did not respond to Novaya Gazeta’s request), the owner of the Lanit IT group Georgy Gens and co-owner IT-holding "Marvel" Sergey Girdin. A Lanit representative told RBC that Gens had nothing to do with the “Moldovan scheme,” and a Marvel representative said that the company had not seen any documents referred to by Novaya Gazeta and for this reason could not comment on anything.
The companies of Krapivin and his partners are the largest contractors of Russian Railways, Novaya Gazeta claims; Krapivin’s father was previously an adviser to the former head of Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin. The procurement activities of Russian Railways are carried out in strict accordance with current legislation, a representative of the monopoly said in response to a request from RBC, most of the competitions are held on electronic platforms and published on the Russian Railways website, competitive procedures always undergo multi-level verification and have been audited many times.
In neighboring Austria, Dossier journalists found 32 recipients of “suspicious transactions” in the Laundromat database, into whose accounts $5.4 million was transferred over several years. Among them, in addition to hotels, private schools and factories, there is also an elderly couple living in village near Vienna. In 2013, they received €52.7 thousand for some “consulting services.”
Journalists from the Polish Newsweek drew attention to the fact that one of the recipients of payments under the Laundromat was the Polish analytical organization European Center for Geopolitical Analysis (ECAG). In May 2013, she received €21 thousand from a Cypriot shell company for “consulting services.” ECAG is headed by far-right politician Mateusz Piskorski. Earlier about the fact that he is one of many European radicals who take an openly pro-Russian position. Piskorsky visited Crimea several times, worked as an observer at the Crimean referendum in March 2014, and acted as an expert on the RT television channel. In May 2016, he was arrested by Polish counterintelligence as a “Russian spy” and remains in custody.
Mateusz Piskorski (Photo: partia-zmiana.pl)
British banks were one of the most important participants in the scheme. Moreover, only about $30 million of “suspicious transactions” passed through branches in the UK itself, while in total British banks were involved in laundering at least $738 million, The Guardian emphasizes. For example, over $545 million passed through HSBC, the bulk of this amount through its Hong Kong branch.
Not all national publications collaborating with OCCRP on investigations have already made their materials public. For example, Finnish Yle and Latvian Re: Baltica have not yet written about the investigation. “We do not interfere in editorial policy, each publication publishes materials when it sees fit, we simply transfer materials to them,” OCCRP Executive Director Paul Radu, a Romanian investigative journalist, explained to RBC. According to Radu, more publications on corruption schemes in China and Hong Kong can be expected in the near future. Over $900 million of “suspicious transactions” passed through each of these countries (Hong Kong has broad financial and economic autonomy from Beijing) as part of the Laundromat. In total, this is even more than the leader of the list, Estonia ($1.5 billion in laundered money).
Which Russian banks are involved in the investigation?
According to participants in the Novaya Gazeta investigation, 18 Russian banks participated in the scheme to transfer criminal funds abroad, 15 of which had their license revoked between 2013 and 2016. As Novaya Gazeta journalist Roman Anin told RBC, in particular, Strategy Bank, Intercapital-Bank, First Czech-Russian Bank, Incredbank, European Express, MBFI, Unicore, etc. were noticed in transferring money to Moldindconbank. Rublevsky, Russian Financial Alliance, Smartbank (until the fall of 2011 ZATO-Bank) and Mast-Bank. According to the publication, the largest amount of money was transferred to Moldova through two banks - the Russian Land Bank and the Zapadny Bank, which at the time of the dubious transactions belonged to the banker Alexander Grigoriev. He was subsequently detained on suspicion of organizing a criminal community for the illegal cashing and withdrawal of funds abroad amounting to about $50 billion, representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs stated.
Another Russian bank appears in the international investigation - RosEvroBank, which, unlike those listed above, acted as a receiving bank, that is, through it the funds were returned to Russia after the completion of the offshore scheme. In response to an official request from RBC, a representative of the bank, which is in the top 50 by assets, denied information about participation in the “Moldovan scheme.” “The mention of our bank in the publication of Novaya Gazeta came as a complete surprise to us; we do not understand how all this relates to us. RosEvroBank operates in strict accordance with the legislation of the Russian Federation and the requirements of the Bank of Russia,” said a representative of RosEvroBank.
The Central Bank and Rosfinmonitoring did not respond to RBC’s request.
What role did imports of goods play in Russia?
Most of the funds withdrawn from Russia are money received from gray imports, writes Novaya Gazeta. The publication confirms this theory with examples obtained through bank transactions and the words of unnamed businessmen “who imported various goods to Russia.” The scheme, as follows from the publication, is as follows: customs officials create impossible conditions for importing goods into Russia, which is why businessmen have to import goods through forwarding companies, which are often associated with the officials themselves. For their services, intermediaries take 30-40% of the cost of the cargo, the publication notes, while “all import transactions were carried out through fictitious companies that did not pay taxes and customs duties” (these same companies received money through fictitious decisions of Moldovan judges).
The problem of gray imports is even broader, points out the chairman of the State Duma Coordination Council for optimizing foreign trade cargo flows, former deputy Mikhail Bryachak. The Customs Service consistently contributes 2.5 trillion rubles to the budget. per year is less than it should be, he is sure, this can be seen when comparing data from the Federal Customs Service, the Central Bank and the UN. “It is quite obvious that such a volume of losses could not have occurred without the participation of the senior management of the service; it is impossible to hide such a volume of goods from customs control in backpacks at night,” he says. “As a result of this, the money that appeared in the hands of corrupt officials and unscrupulous participants in foreign economic activity was naturally withdrawn [from Russia].”
Schemes forcing companies to cooperate with forwarders exist, confirms the President of the Russian Grain Union Arkady Zlochevsky. “I have received information more than once over the past years, from different sources, that importers are extracting huge commissions from these schemes. The schemes are corrupt,” he says. However, now the scale of undervaluation of imports has decreased significantly - if previously the share of gray imports could well be 25-30%, now it has dropped to 5%, says Sergei Pukhov, a leading expert at the Development Center Institute of the Higher School of Economics.
RBC sent a request to the FCS press service and is awaiting a response.
Where are the investigations taking place?
Public statements about the investigation of this scheme were made only by Moldovan, Latvian and Estonian officials, in particular, the President of Moldova Igor Dodon, representatives of the economic police of Latvia and the criminal police of Estonia. The authorities of Russia and Great Britain, whose banks are linked to money laundering, did not confirm information about the investigations.
“These are serious allegations, and we will investigate all data that comes to our attention,” says a representative of the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in a statement received by RBC. The UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO), in response to RBC's request, neither confirmed nor denied information about interest in this case. According to the SFO spokesman, such statements are made in three cases: when a company receives notice of the commencement of an investigation and considers it necessary to notify the market; when the investigation seeks to obtain information from victims; when a company is formally charged.
With the participation of Anna Mogilevskaya, Svetlana Burmistrova and Dmitry Kryukov
The only person detained in Russia in this case, Alexander Grigoriev, was charged with a completely different episode.
Four years ago, on the outskirts of Chisinau, 28-year-old unemployed Vyacheslav Bass was sitting on a bench in his yard, indulging in sad thoughts about where to get money. The answer to this question came completely unexpectedly, in the form of a man in an expensive suit who appeared in the yard. “Do you want to earn $600?” - the man began sharply, and Bass recognized him as a playmate. His name, I think, was Oleg. Having received immediate consent, Oleg offered to sign documents - according to these papers, Bass became a guarantor for some transactions. The unemployed Vyacheslav had nothing to lose, and besides, he heard that someone he knew had been feeding this way for a year, which means it was not a dangerous matter.
Three years later, when Vyacheslav was detained by employees of the National Anti-Corruption Center of Moldova, he learned that he had already signed eight documents (in six cases the signature was forged) and vouched for transactions totaling $1.1 billion. Vyacheslav became a participant in the Moldovan scheme on the withdrawal of funds from Russia - one of the largest money laundering machines in the last five years.
The head of the Supreme Court of Justice (SCJ) of Moldova, Mihai Poalelungi, first publicly announced Moldovan schemes for withdrawing funds from Russia in April 2014. He told the Kommersant newspaper about the dubious decisions of Moldovan judges issuing orders (as writs of execution are called in the Moldovan court) to collect multimillion-dollar debts. The scheme described by Poalelunge worked as follows: offshore companies entered into a fictitious loan agreement, in which a Moldovan citizen and one or more Russian companies were joint defendants. A Moldovan passport holder was required in order for the debt to be collected through local courts. A variety of people were involved: homeless people, pensioners, taxi drivers. The judges promptly “stamped” orders, which were transferred to specific bailiffs, and the latter arrived at a certain Moldovan bank - Moldindconbank - precisely at the moment when money from Russian banks, transferred by guarantor companies supposedly to pay off the debt, arrived in its accounts.
The withdrawal scheme operated from 2010 to the beginning of 2014. During this time, 696.6 billion rubles were withdrawn from Russia through it. ($18.5 billion). An infographic illustrating the scheme for withdrawing funds took up almost half the wall in the office of the head of the Service for the Prevention and Combating of Money Laundering at the National Anti-Corruption Center of Moldova, Vasily Sharko: 100 Russian guarantor companies, 21 Russian banks and Moldovan Moldindconbank, 19 offshore companies, as well as individuals and legal entities from 59 countries - the final recipients of funds in the scheme. According to Charcot, the further path of the money was also traced. Some of them went to purchase real estate, securities, yachts, and cars. “Part of the funds was transferred to companies engaged in business activities, in particular the supply of office equipment,” he said.
In February last year, the anti-corruption prosecutor's office of Moldova opened a case under Art. 243 of the Criminal Code of Moldova “Money Laundering”. His investigation has still not been completed, and Moldovan law enforcement officers complain that the Russian side does not show much desire to investigate the case. “To claim that money laundering has taken place, you need to know for sure: the money was obtained by criminal means. The primary crime, if there was one, was committed in Russia. We sent a request to our Russian colleagues for legal assistance in this criminal case: we asked them to interrogate a number of people. They returned the request to us and set a condition - give the details of Russian companies and banks (participating in the withdrawal of funds. - “Money”),” Deputy Prosecutor General of Moldova Eduard Kharunzhen told our magazine. According to him, if Russia does not declare that a financial crime was committed on its territory and the money withdrawn is “dirty,” then there is no laundering. “And we won’t have a case. Moldova turned out to be just a transit country,” concluded Harunzhen.
But at the end of October this year, the matter moved from a dead point: Russian law enforcement officials announced that they had detained a businessman who, in their opinion, was one of the leaders of the group that was withdrawing money from Russia using Moldovan schemes. The detainee, 44-year-old Alexander Grigoriev, was not known to the general public until that moment. However, even after the arrest, there was no more clarity regarding his career as an entrepreneur.
In the story of the Moldovan schemes, Grigoriev appears as a banker, although little is known about him in the banking market. Three years ago, he began acquiring small shares in small Moscow and regional banks - no more than the third hundred in terms of assets: he bought and sold 16.35% of the Russian Land Bank, a stake in the Podolsk Promsberbank, and became a co-owner of the Zapadny and Transportny banks. and Rostov-based Doninvest. The Central Bank revoked the licenses of all these banks in 2014-2015 for various reasons - for violations of anti-money laundering legislation, high-risk credit policies, falsification of reports and conducting dubious transit transactions in large volumes.
Officially, Grigoriev’s arrest is not connected with Moldovan schemes. He is accused of withdrawing funds from Doninvest Bank in the amount of 105 million rubles. However, the investigation also announced that it considers Grigoriev one of the leaders of the largest organized crime group in Russia (more than 500 people, 60 banks, including with state capital), which was engaged in illegal cash withdrawals and withdrawing money using Moldovan schemes. According to operatives, over the past four years, the organized crime group has withdrawn a cosmic amount from the country - about $46 billion. In terms of the current dollar exchange rate, this is almost a quarter of Russian budget revenues for 2016.
The fight against money withdrawal schemes has so far only led to the emergence of new channels or the improvement of old ones. The uniqueness of Moldovan schemes is that they managed to exist for quite a long time and the volume of funds withdrawn through them is very large. In addition, outwardly they looked absolutely legal. However, the principle itself - the withdrawal of funds using court decisions - is far from new. “It is possible to withdraw money through Russian arbitration courts, but compared to Moldova, it is more difficult and expensive to do this,” said Den’s knowledgeable interlocutors.