Gazprombank employees opened accounts for at least $50 million.
The prosecutor’s office of the Swiss canton of Zurich demands that four bankers of the local “daughter” of Gazprombank, including CEO Roman Abdulin, be sentenced to prison. They are accused of helping to hide tens of millions of francs that friends of Vladimir Putin tried to funnel through the bank.
Prosecutors believe that this money belongs to the Russian president.
The Swiss Tages-Anzeiger and the Financial Times write about the accusations. The latter notes that she received a copy of the indictment in the Zurich court, where the trial in this case is scheduled to begin on March 8. This is not the first case in the West that directly involves assets believed to belong to Putin, the newspaper writes.
Employees of the local branch of Gazprombank were criminally negligent by allowing accounts to be opened in Switzerland in the name of Serhiy Roldugin without checking the origin of the funds, prosecutors claim. Roldugin, a cellist and godfather of Putin’s daughter, gained notoriety after the 2016 publication of the Panama Papers. From the documents regarding 214,000 offshore companies, it became known that several of them are connected to Roldugin, fraudulent transactions were conducted through them and large sums were laundered.
The indictment states: “Russian President Putin is known to have an official income of just over 100,000 Swiss francs and is not rich, but in reality he has huge assets managed by people close to him. Roldugin… [Був] a false person”. Gazprombank employees opened accounts for at least $50 million for Roldugin, and he planned to transfer another $10 million a year to Switzerland through a complex scheme involving several shell companies and accounts.
“The declared assets could not have been Roldugin’s assets in any way,” the indictment says. It also details how Bank Rossiya employees registered companies in Roldugin’s name while trying to hide their involvement in the case by using anonymous email addresses.
Bank “Russia” is a bank for leading Russian politicians, and its majority shareholder and chairman of the board of directors [Юрій Ковальчук] is considered Putin’s treasurer,” the indictment reads. According to prosecutors, Gazprombank bankers signed documents stating that Roldugin is not a “politically significant person,” despite numerous publications about his ties to Putin. Recognizing him as such required an additional check.
However, Roldugin’s check at Gazprombank included only a printout from the website of the Mariinsky Theater, where he was a conductor, and a single negative result from a search of the Worldcheck database.
A representative of Gazprombank Switzerland, which is in the process of being closed due to Western sanctions, rejected the accusations against the bank’s employees and refused to comment further on the court case.
