Alexander Sharkevich, an elite Russian Ministry of the Interior undercover cop investigating money laundering, stops his Lexus near Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, opens the window and exchanges words with a man standing on the corner.
As Sharkevich puts the car back in gear, the man tosses a package through the still-open window.
Agents of the Russian Federal Security Service (better known by its Russian acronym, FSB) swarm in, surprising Sharkevich, who steps on the gas and takes off.
The FSB agents catch up to him a few kilometers away, where he is trapped in Moscow’s legendary traffic.
The package contains 350,000 euros (US$414,696) in cash. After a two-hour standoff, Sharkevich tries to explain that he is working undercover, assigned to worm his way into the confidence of a high-level money launderer.
The FSB agents arrest him anyway. After a year and a half in jail, he manages to beat the corruption charges in 2009.
However, the suspected money launderer he was targeting has gone free — shielded, Sharkevich says, by high-level protection within the security services.
Now retired, Sharkevich offers a unique view of money laundering.
He says it is wired as deeply into Russia’s police and security apparatus as it is into business and finance.
Bankers engaged in laundering often enjoy unofficial dispensation for their illicit businesses, which arms of the state themselves can use for everything including monitoring criminal flows and funding covert operations abroad.
If the moneymen get caught and come to a “bad end,” it is usually because their powerful protectors have lost their jobs, he says.
“These bankers provide various services supposedly in the interests of the state,” Sharkevich says.
In return, “the bankers are allowed to not only break the law, but also to take money out of the country,” he says.
Whether banker Alexei Kulikov was scapegoated in the Promsberbank case to protect people more powerful than he might never be known.
He testified in court that he was just small fry, a minority shareholder with a 19 percent stake, and a dutiful son who gave the shares to his mother as a 70th birthday present.
He did not sit on the board of directors. He did not even have a title.
The 437-page indictment against him portrays him rather differently.
He was the ringleader who put together the investor group to buy the bank in 2012, installed allies in key management posts and began pumping out huge loans to new clients, it says.
Most of them were companies with no real operations — “one-day firms,” as they are known in Russian business parlance — that never paid back the loans, prosecutors said.
Kulikov’s partners in the Promsberbank takeover had a long record in the Russian financial industry — mostly involving failed banks.
Igor Putin, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s cousin, joined the Promsberbank board when Kulikov and the other investors took over, according to court documents.
He left the board in 2014.
By that time, two other lenders in which Igor Putin was involved had been shut down by regulators.
In a statement to the Russian press that year, he said that he was getting out of banking and called for the industry “to be cleansed of banks headed by people with dubious reputations.”
He has since disappeared from the public eye and could not be reached for comment for this story.
One of the failed banks Igor Putin was involved in — along with Promsberbank investor Alexander Grigoriev — was Russky Zemelny Bank, the largest single player in the notorious “Russian Laundromat” affair.
The Russian central bank puts the total amount of money run through the Laundromat over a period of about 18 months at US$21 billion, most of it funneled through the impoverished former Soviet republic of Moldova.
However, government investigators have said the figure could be twice that much.
Russia’s Novaya Gazeta newspaper, along with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, linked 70,000 transactions, as well as 1,920 companies in the UK and 373 in the US to the scheme.
Grigoriev has been in jail since November 2015, charged with setting up a criminal organization at two other banks he owned.
He denies those allegations and says he sold his Promsberbank stake before the crimes with which Kulikov is charged took place.
Despite Igor Putin’s and Grigoriev’s somewhat lofty perches in the pantheon of Russian banking, Kulikov did not finger them as masterminds behind the Promsberbank affair. He pointed to another one of his investment partners: Ivan Myazin.
Myazin’s office in downtown Moscow is not the kind that draws attention to itself. There is no name on the door. The place is barely furnished.
Myazin, 53, is flanked by his lawyer as he gives his first-ever interview.
He is slender and dressed in an
expensive-looking blue blazer and jeans.
He makes no apologies for his association with Vyacheslav Ivankov, a legendary Russian organized crime boss known as “Yaponchik” (Little Japanese) who was gunned down on a Moscow street in 2009.
“He was a quiet, smart, simple man,” Myazin says. “We used to celebrate New Year’s together with our families.”
However, Myazin says that association does not make him a crook.
He is a “financial consultant” with no shortage of clients, he says, although he declines to identify any of them.
Yes, the three banks he is invested in, including Promsberbank, all had their licenses revoked, but that is the result of overzealous regulators, not any wrongdoing on his part, he says.
As for banker Alexander Lebedev’s allegation that he was “one of the creators” of the Laundromat operation, Myazin denies it.
“I got squeamish when I heard about it,” he adds.
Myazin says Kulikov approached him in 2012 about investing in Promsberbank.
“When Kulikov pitched the bank [to me], it looked like a sweetheart — only 0.3 percent bad loans,” he says.
Adding to Myazin’s confidence in the Promsberbank deal was that Grigoriev was on board as a coinvestor.
“I have known Sasha Grigoriev since before he was a banker,” Myazin says. “He was a well-known fixer. He had great contacts.”
Financial Bridge, the early mirror-trader, also participated, advising on the deal and holding stakes for some shareholders, Myazin testified.
In the run-up to Kulikov’s trial, the police questioned Myazin. He was never charged in connection with the Promsberbank affair, but he was definitely in the courtroom to testify against his erstwhile partner.
It is a June day in Podolsk, midway through Kulikov’s trial. The defendant is in his cage, glowering. Myazin is at the witness stand, talking up Kulikov’s stature at Promsberbank.
“Of course, Alexei played a very active role in the activities of the bank,” Myazin testifies. “He had a very weighty vote.”
Kulikov objects, saying it was Myazin, after all, who had signed the employment contract hiring Promsberbank chairman Boris Fomin, who allegedly went into hiding after his name showed up on a wanted list in connection with defrauding the bank.
Judge Diana Almayeva orders Kulikov to be quiet.
Later in the proceedings, Kulikov’s lawyer, Tatyana Galimardanova, presses Myazin on the contract issue — his signature is right there.
“That is surprising to me,” he says. “There is no way I should have signed that protocol, but I see my signature.”
Shortly before the end of the trial, Kulikov gets a chance to question Myazin directly. The back-and-forth grows tense. When Kulikov presses Myazin on whether he was aware of the theft of assets from the bank, the judge shuts him down.
“Do not get carried away, Kulikov,” she says without further explanation, moving quickly to wrap up the testimony.
Four months later, in October, Almayeva begins reading her verdict aloud, as Russian court procedure requires. It takes almost a full week to get through the 400-odd pages.
Her voice grows hoarse and hurried as she recites the arguments, accepting those of the prosecution and dismissing those of the defense.
The final verdict and sentence come on a rainy Friday morning: guilty, nine years in prison.
On one of the visitors’ benches, Kulikov’s mother sobs.
Maria Plyushkina, Kulikov’s partner, tries to comfort her, saying there is still a chance for appeal.
His lawyers would file one a few weeks later.
In the defendant’s cage, Kulikov turns pale, lowers his face into his hands and leans against the bars, tears welling up in his eyes. His hands grip the metal shafts so tightly his knuckles turn white.
“Is the verdict understood?” Almayeva asks.
“Yes, your honor,” Kulikov says.
This is part II of a two-part story. Part I appeared in yesterday’s edition.
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