According to the Moldovan scheme. How the “Moldavian money laundering scheme” worked
The Ministry of Internal Affairs announced the disclosure of the list of banks participating in the so-called “Moldovan” scheme. About half of them belong to existing banks.
About the “Moldovan” scheme
In September last year, the press reported that law enforcement agencies began to check a scheme for withdrawing funds from Russia through Moldova in the amount of almost 700 billion rubles. There were 19 financial organizations participating in the scheme, many of which have now lost their licenses. These included Zapadny Bank, Transportny Bank, Mast Bank, Russian Land Bank, Taurus, Rublevsky and others. All of them have already lost their licenses. Along with them, the information from the Ministry of Internal Affairs includes Mosoblbank, which is currently undergoing reorganization by SMP Bank, as well as Sovetsky Bank - they are looking for a sanator for it.
Previously, there was information in the press that a large-scale scheme for transferring funds from Russia to Moldova included the use of false court orders, which were allegedly issued by district courts of Moldova. The Ministry of Internal Affairs has already begun checking in this direction.
The “Moldovan” scheme was described as follows: foreign companies entered into loan agreements under which Russian companies were allegedly issued loans in amounts equal to hundreds of millions of dollars or they acted as guarantors for them. No one fulfilled their obligations on these debts, and the creditors sent their appeals to the Moldovan courts - this was possible, since Moldovan citizens were listed as guarantors for the loans. As it became clear later, they represented socially unprotected groups and did not know what business they were participating in - their signatures were falsified.
A week ago it was already reported that Alexander Grigoriev, the leader of a criminal group involved in cashing out money using the “Moldovan” scheme, had been arrested. Before the financial business, Grigoriev owned Construction Management-888, one of the Yakut companies for the construction and repair of transport facilities, incl. airfields. The board of directors of this company included Igor Putin, who is the cousin of the Russian President.
The Russian Land Bank has a bad reputation. The bank for a long time belonged to the Inteko company (it was controlled by Elena Baturina, the wife of the ex-mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov. In November 2010, she sold the bank to offshore companies, after which it came into the possession of, among others, Alexander Grigoriev and Igor Putin Having changed owners, the bank began to aggressively attract deposits. For example, when in 2013 all banks offered deposit rates of no higher than 10% per annum, in the Russian Land Bank it was possible to open a deposit at a 13-14% rate. During the same period Igor Putin left the bank. And as soon as the bank was deprived of its license, the press learned that at the end of June law enforcement agencies had opened a criminal case related to the illegal withdrawal of funds abroad by one of the clients of the Russian Land Bank.
According to Natalya Borzova, Deputy General Director for Bank Relations at Finexpertiza, sometimes it happens that the bank unwittingly takes part in the scheme. He is engaged in servicing client accounts, and if the operation does not raise any doubts, then the bank can let it through on completely legal grounds. But even in this case, the situation will still turn against him. After all, the Central Bank pays its attention to all aspects of its activities. Participation in any dubious scheme encourages the use of appropriate punitive measures.
According to representatives of the press service of Mosoblbank, since the beginning of the reorganization in Mosoblbank, no suspicious transactions have been noted. “Strategy” stated that the bank was engaged in interbank transactions with Moldinkonbank, but all transactions were legal and an inspection check by the Bank of Russia had already taken place last year. Moreover, no claims were made by the regulator regarding these operations to the bank.
Other banks did not give any comments on this issue.
This spring, a money laundering scheme through Moldova, which allegedly ceased to exist in 2014, resurfaced. But as the director of the Anti-Corruption Department recently stated, in 2015, numerous violations falling under the so-called “Moldovan scheme” were registered, as a result of which more than $10 million were withdrawn. In February 2016, we read that one of the judges involved in the scandal continued to work as if nothing had happened.
Let us recall how the scheme functioned. Two offshore companies entered into a fictitious loan agreement for a large amount. The guarantors under the agreement were Russian companies opened for Moldovan residents, which made it possible to apply for a resolution of the dispute to a Moldovan court. When the contract expired, the debtor refused to repay the loan, transferring the claim to the guarantor company. This is where the Moldovan judicial authorities came into play. The creditor went to court, and the court made a decision on the repayment of the loan by the Russian company. During the existence of the scheme, about a hundred such companies were involved. Money from Russia, through the account of bailiffs in Moldovan banks controlled by fraudsters, went to Latvian banks, in particular to Trusta Commerce Bank.
Trasta komercbanka lost its license in March 2016 for this. Then the bank was charged with many things, including recalling participation in the Moldavian schemes. Moldovan problems have already caused trouble for the offshore industry when, in 2015, the trail of millions stolen from Moldovan banks led to Scotland. Scottish partnerships were peacefully registered for the whole world by enterprising Baltic people, and then there was such a scandal. A number of registered addresses in Scotland have been blacklisted. Honest entrepreneurs got into trouble because Moldovans close to the authorities stole millions.
The amounts withdrawn from fictitious loans are estimated at tens of billions of dollars. About $650 million was stolen from banks. Latvian banks, registrars and lawyers came under scrutiny. Hundreds of Scottish partnerships have changed their addresses so that those who have never seen either Moldovan or indeed any other millions can continue to work. And although corruption in Moldova seems to have been exposed at the very top level of government, the consequences largely concern completely different individuals. Here is a typical example of the resolution of offshore scandals - big names gradually disappear from the news, and for the majority the screws are tightened and the rules are changed towards tightening. Transparency for almost everyone is a modern trend.
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, to 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 largest money laundering operation in Eastern Europe. It was about the withdrawal of $22 billion (or about 700 billion rubles) from Russia from 2011 to 2014 under the guise of execution of illegal court decisions made by Moldovan judges.
Since then, criminal cases have been filed around the world, and some of the European banks involved in Russian money laundering have had their licenses revoked or fined.
And although Russia was and remains the main affected country in this story, our investigation into this large-scale scheme at the level of law enforcement agencies is sluggish. Moreover: last week the Moldovan authorities accused the Russian special services of deliberately opposing the investigation of this case and putting pressure on Moldovan officials.
For almost five years, Novaya Gazeta, together with journalists from other countries around the world, tried to answer the main questions in this story: who got about 700 billion rubles illegally withdrawn from Russia, and what was this money spent on? And now, five years later, we can partially answer these questions.
We were able to obtain unique data on the movement of money through the accounts of companies involved in laundering $22 billion. In total, we studied 76 thousand bank transactions. The total turnover of these transactions amounted to $156 billion. Money withdrawn from Russia reached 732 banks in 96 countries. They were received by 5,140 companies from a variety of jurisdictions - from the USA and South Africa - to China and Australia.
We shared this data with 61 journalists from 32 countries. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), The Guardian, Sueddeutsche Zeitung and others participated in the investigation.
In each country, our colleagues tried to find the final recipients of the money withdrawn from Russia and understand how the money was used. As we expected, 700 billion rubles did not have a single source. Money from the largest government contracts fell into the common pot, which we called the Laundromat; from smuggling of electronics, clothing and military products; from theft of assets in banks; and even from financing political projects in Europe.
The results of this investigation will be simultaneously published in Russia, Moldova, Ukraine, Great Britain, Finland, Denmark, USA, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and other countries.
Video: Gleb Limansky, Anna Ignatenko, Liliya Sharipova
How the Laundromat worked
In September 2014, two people arrived from Moscow to Chisinau on an important and secret mission. Going through passport control, they could have surprised the Moldovan border guards: their passports were issued on the same day by the Russian Foreign Ministry and just a day before their arrival in Chisinau. But the Moldovan intelligence services were warned about their visit. Guests from Moscow were expected and even had high hopes for their arrival.
The young men (both were in their early 30s) were named Alexey Shmatkov and Evgeny Volotovsky. Both are officers of the “K” department of the Russian FSB, which is engaged in counterintelligence support for the country’s credit and financial system. Volotovsky and Shmatkov arrived in Chisinau to represent the Russian FSB at a joint meeting with Moldovan law enforcement officials. The intelligence services of the two countries were supposed to agree on a joint investigation into one of the largest money laundering operations in Eastern Europe - the withdrawal of $22 billion from Russia with the help of illegal decisions of Moldovan judges.
The FSB officers were accompanied during their trip by a Russian embassy employee. After staying in Chisinau for two days, Volotovsky and Shmatkov returned to Moscow. And since then, according to statements by the Moldovan authorities, Russian intelligence services began to interfere with the investigation of the money laundering case, and Moldovan officials who visited Russia on official visits began to come under pressure. This case has already caused a diplomatic scandal between Russia and Moldova.
Is the FSB behind everything?
Last Thursday, Reuters, citing sources in Moldovan law enforcement agencies and the government, reported that FSB officers may be behind the scheme to launder $22 billion through Moldova. And shortly before this, the Prime Minister of Moldova and the Chairman of Parliament sent a note of protest to the Russian ambassador in connection with the mass detentions, searches and interrogations of Moldovan officials in Russia.
In particular, Reuters quotes the Deputy Prosecutor General of Moldova, Yuri Garaba, who was detained at the Moscow airport two months ago, despite the fact that he arrived in Russia on an official visit as part of a delegation. In total, Moldovan authorities talk about 25 officials who have been subjected to pressure from Russian intelligence services over the past few months. One employee of the Moldovan Ministry of Internal Affairs has been detained and interrogated 35 times recently.
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The Moldovan authorities associate this behavior of the Russian special services not with the Kremlin’s policies, but with the desire of individual FSB representatives to obstruct the investigation into the laundering of $22 billion. The note of protest handed over to the Russian ambassador, according to Reuters, states that Russian law enforcement agencies many times ignored the requests of their Moldovan colleagues to help them with the investigation and establish the origin of 700 billion rubles withdrawn from Russia.
As sources in Moldovan law enforcement agencies told OCCRP, the current diplomatic scandal began in 2014 with the reluctance of Russian intelligence services to assist in the investigation.
“We had the feeling that they [Volotovsky and Shmatkov] came not to help us, but to find out how far we had progressed in the investigation and to get all the materials. After that they began to play with us as if they were playing ping-pong; our requests to Russia were redirected from one FSB unit to another,” says a Moldovan law enforcement officer on condition of anonymity.
Moldavian President Igor Dodon was also forced to respond to the Reuters report: “I think that it is not worth making such statements. A very detailed investigation of this entire scheme is currently underway. We know that $22 billion of Russian money went to the West through Moldovan banks. We have opened several criminal cases in Moldova regarding this matter. The competent authorities are involved. We hope that our Russian law enforcement colleagues will do everything possible to clarify this situation. But I think it’s premature to say that some state structures, security forces or others, are involved,” he told the RNS agency.
Criminal proceedings
Statements by the Moldovan authorities that the FSB is behind the withdrawal of $22 billion from Russia can be considered an emotional reaction to the reluctance of the Russian special services to assist in the investigation. And although some officers of the central apparatus of the FSB indeed behaved strangely in this matter, and one even served as a seconded employee in a bank through which funds were withdrawn according to the “Moldavian scheme,” nevertheless, the “Moldavian scheme” of laundering was identified in Russia precisely thanks to the efforts of individual divisions of the FSB. And first of all from the FSB department for Moscow and the Moscow region.
But when it came to initiating criminal cases, in Russia, unlike Moldova and other countries, the investigation began to slow down.
Back in 2014, Novaya Gazeta wrote about Laundromat, which is what we called the scheme to launder $22 billion through the Moldovan bank Moldindconbank. At the same time, several criminal cases were initiated.
According to one of them, a Novaya Gazeta correspondent was interrogated twice as a witness and even voluntary seizure of documents was carried out.
However, these cases were investigated in the district investigative departments of the Moscow Ministry of Internal Affairs, they were repeatedly transferred from one investigator to another, years passed, and the organizers of the illegal withdrawal of almost 700 billion rubles from Russia still could not be found.
At the same time, in Moldova, according to the head of the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office, Viorel Morari, today the courts are considering 14 cases against judges who made illegal decisions; cases are also being investigated against bailiffs who wrote off money from Russian bank accounts; High-ranking employees of the Central Bank of Moldova are also under investigation.
A criminal case of money laundering in Latvia is no less actively being investigated: money withdrawn from Russia to Moldova was subsequently transferred to the Trasta Komercbanka bank from Riga, whose license was recently revoked for dubious banking transactions.
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Typical "dumpster"
Three years before the visit of employees of the “K” department of the FSB of Russia to Chisinau, in 2011, a 62-year-old resident of the Moscow Zyablikovo district, Nikolai Gorokhov, was looking for work. He called one of the advertisements in the newspaper, and he was offered to become a registrar - he had to register companies for himself. For each company he was paid 800 rubles. Since then, according to the Federal Tax Service of Russia, Gorokhov is listed as a director in 36 companies.
A Moscow pensioner met a Novaya Gazeta reporter on the threshold of his apartment wearing sweatpants. “I am a “nominal”, or better said, “a garbage man” ( One-day companies in Russia are often called “dumpsters.” —Ed . ). I could tell you a lot, but understand, Spartak is playing there now. And I’m on “Spartak”…” said Gorokhov.
The day after Spartak beat Anzhi Makhachkala, Gorokhov met with us in the center of Moscow. “I’ll tell you a story that any “nominee” will repeat exactly. I registered companies in my name and signed documents to open bank accounts. There could be up to a dozen of them for each company: accounts were opened, after a couple of months they were closed and new ones were opened,” says Gorokhov.
And in 2013-2014, they began to call him to the tax office and the police.
“They told me: you are a scavenger. Do you know that millions were transferred out of Russia from these companies? Since then I’ve been trying to get rid of these companies,” says Gorokhov.
and shows his application to the tax office, where he claims that he had no real relationship with the companies registered in his name. But just in case, he asked the Novaya Gazeta correspondent how much money had passed through the accounts of his companies, apparently hoping to somehow claim his rights to these funds. In addition to 800 rubles for each company, he was promised about 20 thousand rubles per month as a “director”. But this money was not paid.
One of the companies registered in Gorokhov’s name was Legat LLC. 1.4 billion rubles were withdrawn from the accounts of this company under the “Moldovan scheme.”
Scheme on the knee
In January 2011, a UK company, Valemont Properties Ltd, allegedly purchased a promissory note 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 Legat, the “scavenger” Gorokhov, and Moldavian citizen Maxim Mishchechikhin.
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 went to the court of the Riscani district of the city of Chisinau at the place of registration of Mishchechikhin. The entire role of the Moldovan citizen, who had never seen $400 million in his life, boiled down to precisely this - ensuring Moldovan jurisdiction, where the organizers of the scheme had good connections.
And at the end of April 2012, Judge Valeriu Gishke made a decision to recover $400 million in favor of Valemont Properties. According to Moldovan media reports, Gishke, like other judges who made similar decisions, is under investigation.
Today it is already known that all these bills, guarantees and court decisions were fictitious. The main goal was to obtain legal justification for withdrawing money from Russia.
The whole scheme was invented in 2010 by large Russian cashers “on their knees,” as one of them admitted to Novaya Gazeta. At that time, cashers faced a serious problem: Russian money of dubious origin became more difficult to send abroad under the then standard scheme of fictitious imports. Because systems for tracking the movement of goods across the border were automated, and regulatory authorities saw online when goods actually crossed the border, and when, under the guise of imports, money obtained by criminal means was simply withdrawn from the country.
And the whole innovation of Laundromat was that cashers received an ironclad basis for withdrawing money abroad - a court decision.
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After Valeriu Gishke made a decision to recover $400 million in favor of Valemont Properties, bailiff Svetlana Mocan became 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. In any other situation, the chances of finding accounts of Russian shell companies on the territory of Moldova would be zero. But in the case of the Laundromat, everything was foreseen in advance.
Head of a criminal community
Svetlana Mocan had accounts opened in the Moldovan bank Moldindconbank. By a happy coincidence, at the same time, correspondent accounts of the Russian MAST Bank and Intercapital Bank were opened in this bank.
It was in these banks that the Legat company of pensioner Nikolai Gorokhov was serviced. Having received a court order from Svetlana Mocan, Moldindconbank employees forcibly collected funds from correspondent accounts of Russian banks to pay off the fictitious debt of the Legat company. Once in the accounts of the bailiff Mokan, Russian rubles were converted into dollars and transferred to the account of the British company Valemont Properties.
Thus, under the guise of a court order, from July to September 2012, 1.4 billion rubles were allegedly transferred to the account of Valemont Properties on behalf of Legat.
MAST-Bank and Intercapital-Bank were part of the group of Sergei Magin, who was convicted in 2017 of organizing a criminal organization that was involved in money laundering. According to documents from the criminal case, 169 billion rubles were transferred to the settlement accounts of fictitious companies in Magin banks from January 2012 to July 2013. “For carrying out illegal banking transactions with clients’ funds, members of the criminal community received a commission of no less than 2.5% of each transferred and cashed amount of money and no less than 1.3% of each amount converted into foreign currency and transferred abroad,” - says the materials of the criminal case.
But Sergei Magin was not the only Russian casher working according to the “Moldavian scheme”, there were hundreds of companies such as Legat, and directors such as Spartak fan Nikolai Gorokhov. We also talked with other “nominees” whose companies also transferred money to Moldova. Their stories, down to the smallest details, are identical to the one told by Gorokhov.
Svetlana Mokan’s accounts alone received $17 billion during the operation of the Laundromat.
The whole cashing world
Not only Sergei Magin’s banks, but almost all major Russian cashing companies worked according to the “Moldavian scheme”.
In total, almost 20 Russian banks were found transferring money to Moldindconbank using fictitious court decisions (most of them had their licenses revoked for dubious banking transactions). The TOP 5 Russian credit institutions that sent the largest amount of money to Moldova included two banks of Alexander Grigoriev - Russian Land Bank (RZB) and Zapadny Bank. Only through them, according to the “Moldovan scheme,” 10.6 billion dollars, or about 350 billion rubles, were withdrawn from Russia.
Alexander Grigoriev is originally from St. Petersburg. Before he became a co-owner of RZB and Zapadny, he was known as the main shareholder of the construction company SU-888 from Yakutsk, which participated in several large government projects. However, having entered the banking business, Grigoriev met several major players in the market of illegal banking services. And clients of large cashers flocked to the banks he acquired.
Today Alexander Grigoriev is in custody in a case unrelated to Laundromat. Grigoriev and his partners are accused of stealing assets from the Rostov bank Doninvest. As far as Novaya Gazeta knows, there are no cases against Grigoriev in connection with the withdrawal of hundreds of billions of rubles from Russia.
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Grigoriev, while he was free and while his banks were operating according to the “Moldavian scheme,” had influential partners. The board of directors of RZB included Igor Putin, the cousin of the Russian president. Before RZB, Igor Putin already had experience in the banking sector - for example, he was on the board of directors of Master Bank, which also had its license revoked for laundering criminal proceeds.
Putin and Grigoriev appear to have had a long-standing partnership. Putin was on the board of directors of the construction company SU-888, as well as the Podolsk Promsberbank - in both structures Grigoriev was a shareholder. However, the partners subsequently separated, and Igor Putin even published a special letter in which he emphasized the need for a radical improvement of the banking system.
In the situation with the RZB, as Putin wrote, “competent sources warned me in advance about the real state of affairs, confirming my fears. Realizing that I was unable to change financial policy, I decided to leave the bank’s board of directors.”
Participants in the preparation of the material: Andrey Galyatkin, Alesya Marokhovskaya, Irina Dolinina, Elizaveta Tsybulina
Photo: PhotoXPress.ru
Western media are paying increased attention to the “Moldavian scheme”, through which $22 billion was withdrawn from Russia, for political reasons, according to Rosfinmonitoring. The scheme itself was closed two years ago and representatives of the security forces did not participate in it, the department claims.
The attention of the foreign press to the “Moldovan scheme” for withdrawing funds from Russia is politicized, State Secretary and Deputy Director of Rosfinmonitoring Pavel Livadny told RNS on the sidelines of the congress of the Association of Russian Banks (ARB). According to him, the scheme, with the help of which about $22 billion was withdrawn from the country from 2011 to 2014, is exclusively criminal in nature, and the security forces have nothing to do with it.
“The scheme is quite old. The work was carried out actively. The scheme has been liquidated for two years now. The increased attention from Western media is exclusively politicized. This scheme is exclusively criminal in nature. Politicized, apparently, in connection with the election of the President of Moldova, who is considered pro-Russian,” he said.
“Naturally, there was no money associated with the activities of law enforcement agencies of the Russian Federation, or Moldovan ones by the way. This is an exclusively criminal scheme, which operated only due to the fact that the Moldovan courts made the appropriate decisions,” Livadny summed up.
Earlier, Novaya Gazeta reported that the main beneficiaries of the withdrawal of more than 700 billion rubles. from Russia under the “Moldovan scheme” were allegedly Russian Railways contractor Alexey Krapivin, owner of the Lanit group Georgy Gens and co-owner of the Marvel IT holding Sergey Girdin.
Moldovan President Igor Dodon told RNS that it is premature to draw conclusions about those involved in shadow operations.
On March 24, the Bank of Russia reported that the “Moldovan scheme” was identified by the regulator back in 2013, and by mid-2014 its use was completely stopped.
“At the end of 2013, the Bank of Russia identified and identified as the withdrawal of funds abroad the so-called “Moldovan” scheme, according to which funds from Russian banks were transferred to the accounts of foreign companies opened in a number of Moldovan banks, primarily in Moldindconbank,” said regulator representative.
According to the Central Bank, 23 Russian banks participated in the scheme, including the Russian Land Bank, Baltika Bank, European Express, Smartbank, Mast Bank, Intercapital Bank, Zapadny Bank, Energy Business Bank and others.
"Laundromat"
As Novaya Gazeta wrote, scammers who illegally withdrew money from Russia faced difficulties in 2010, as the traditional withdrawal scheme using fictitious imports stopped working due to improvements in systems for moving goods across borders.
As a result, a new scheme was developed, with the help of which money could be withdrawn by decision of a Moldovan court. It worked like this: one fictitious company with an account in the Moldovan Moldindconbank entered into a loan agreement with another fictitious company for hundreds of millions of dollars. A Russian shell company acted as a guarantor.
After the borrower stopped paying his debts, the creditor appealed to the Moldovan court, which, in turn, decided to collect the debt from the creditor, whose account was opened with a Russian bank participating in the scheme. As a result, funds were “legally” withdrawn from Russia to Moldova, and then to third countries.
The foreign banks that appeared in the scheme included, in particular, Danske Bank, through which $1.2 billion was withdrawn, Bank of China ($717 million), HSBC ($545 million), UBS and others. Among the Russian banks were named Rosevrobank ($576 million), as well as credit organizations with a revoked license: Russian Land Bank, Baltika Bank, European Express, Zapadny Bank and Mast Bank.
On March 22, the Prosecutor General's Office of Moldova announced the initiation of criminal cases against 16 Moldovan judges, who are accused of knowingly taking part in the “Moldovan scheme.” Cases were also initiated against four bailiffs, four employees of the National Bank of Moldova and nine employees of a commercial bank.
Banks confirm
On March 21, the British bank HSBC confirmed the implementation of a number of transactions as part of the “Moldavian scheme” for withdrawing money from Russia, according to the credit institution’s commentary for RNS.
"HSBC was not at the center of the alleged scheme but was monitoring individual transactions without knowledge of their relationship or the existence of a larger scheme," bank spokesman Ankit Patel said.
He said: “This case highlights the need for more detailed data sharing between the public and private sectors, each of which has important information that the other does not.”
Danske Bank previously confirmed to RNS the involvement of its subsidiary bank in Estonia in the “Moldavian scheme” to withdraw funds from Russia: “We are aware of the transactions in question and have already discussed them with the authorities of Denmark and Estonia. During this period (from 2011 to 2014 - RNS), our systems and procedures in Estonia were insufficient to completely prevent us from being used for money laundering purposes.”
A similar scheme continues to operate
In early February, the Kommersant newspaper wrote that in Russia there is a money laundering scheme “protected from all sides by law,” the key link of which is the Federal Bailiff Service (FSSP). Over the course of a year, using this scheme, 16 billion rubles were “legally” withdrawn from Russia.
The existence of such a scheme was confirmed by the Central Bank. “According to the Bank of Russia, in 2016, with its help, about 16 billion rubles were transferred to foreign accounts, or more than 10% of the total volume of suspicious transactions identified for the year,” the regulator’s press service told the newspaper.
The scheme usually involves two legal entities: one Russian, the other foreign. A non-resident files a lawsuit to collect debt from a company in Russia, the latter agrees to the demands. The courts satisfy the plaintiff's demands, which allows the company registered abroad to apply to the FSSP to collect the debt, which is later transferred to an account in a foreign bank.
As the newspaper notes, the Central Bank is currently developing measures to combat this scheme for withdrawing funds from Russia.
In general, as a result of imaginary foreign economic transactions over the past three years, about 1 trillion rubles have been withdrawn from Russia abroad, Sergei Shtogrin, auditor of the Accounts Chamber, reported in early March.