Thread by @JasonLeopold

Documents: Promsvyazbank was a conduit in some of the biggest money laundering operations in history.

Examiners at major Western financial institutions had flagged “suspicious” transactions coming out of Promsvyazbank as long ago as 2011.
buzzfeednews.com/article/anthon… via @buzzfeed

The documents show how PSB provided a conduit for anonymous shell companies to participate in global money laundering schemes and how it gave members of Putin’s inner circle unfettered access to the American financial system.

Among the most prominent were the Rotenberg family.

The US government first sanctioned Arkady Rotenberg, and others, in 2014 for their alleged role in the annexation of Crimea, a peninsula in southern Ukraine.

Blocked from doing business in the US, Rotenberg sold his stake in a real estate company to his son Igor. The company then continued to tap into the American financial system through the Russian bank.

In 2016, Deutsche Bank grew suspicious of about $5 million in transactions by one of the Rotenberg family’s companies. That firm, Belize-based Netmar Holdings, used PSB to send “unusually high dividend payments” to the real estate company’s top executives, documents show.

Spokespeople for the Rotenberg family and PSB did not return detailed messages seeking comment.

Examiners at Standard Chartered bank found in 2017 that PSB moved money for multiple companies tied to the Russian Laundromat, a global scheme to steal somewhere between $20 billion and $80 billion. A major Latvian bank lost its European license over the matter.

Bank of New York Mellon also reported that one of those companies, Seabon Limited, sent $57 million between June 2013 and January 2014 to entities located mainly in Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates. The majority of those transactions were filtered through PSB.

A year after DB raised red flags about the Rotenberg family, it grew suspicious about another PSB client connected to Putin. It identified 39 wire transfers for more than $2M sent to and from Channel One Russia Worldwide. At least 23 of those transactions went through PSB.

The bank raised concerns because of Channel One’s connection to Roman Abramovich, the billionaire who at that time held a 24% stake in the company. The bank wrote that Abramovich had been investigated multiple times for money laundering.

Abramovich's attorney said in 2018 that Abramovich “has never been charged with participating in money laundering and does not have a criminal record.”

DB also wrote that one of the recipients of the Channel One wire transfers was controlled by Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who had already been indicted in the US & was arrested in Austria on charges of racketeering & bribery. A spox for Firtash said he was unable to comment

PSB also transferred money for a shell company linked to a Russian tax refund scheme that moved some of the proceeds into American real estate — including high-end properties in Manhattan.

In May 2017, Barclays in New York sent a suspicious activity report to the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit, FinCEN, raising red flags on more than a dozen shell companies it suspected of participating in the conspiracy.

One of those companies, Nysorko Limited, based in Cyprus, sent 14 wire transfers totaling nearly $3 million from its account at PSB to Barclays accounts in England between May and October 2008.