How Rustem Teregulov and Tatyana Kharitonova were lured into the shadows through Razvitie-Stolitsa Bank for 104 million rubles.

This winter, the Central Bank of Russia announced that it had identified cash withdrawal scheme using gold coins. It begins with the transfer of funds to a fictitious company that buys investment coins, and ends with their delivery to the bank for cash.

But, apparently, such a mechanism has been operating in the country for quite a long time, at least since 2016. In any case, the case of the Forus company and the Razvitie-Stolitsa bank, which is now being considered in the Arbitration Court of the capital, tells us about this. […]

This story began back in March 2018 with the bankruptcy of the little-known Forus company. She was left with multi-million dollar debts. And studying the financial documents, the bankruptcy trustee discovered that six months before the company was declared insolvent, a tidy sum of 104,738,046 rubles was written off from its account in the Razvitie-Stolitsa bank. The owner of Forus (who is also the only employee), Mr. Karpov, purchased promissory notes from this very bank for this amount. But in the future, the money from the sale of these securities to the accounts of Forus never arrived.

And these bills were cashed out by four offices that never had any commercial transactions with Forus as a result of which they could receive papers in a legal way.

On the part of the bankruptcy trustee, an invoice was provided to the court, which directly or indirectly confirms the affiliation of these offices to the Razvitie-Stolitsa bank.

An interesting moment: during the trial, the owner of Forus, Mr. Karpov, was suddenly attacked by amnesia. He said that he forgot how he disposed of bills for 104 million!

And also in court, information was announced that three offices that cashed bills in the Capital Development bank were engaged in operations with George the Victorious investment coins. We are talking, at least, about acquiring 93,980 coins at different times (this is 731.1 kg of gold). Although they did not have expenses typical for organizations involved in the wholesale trade in gold (for security, collection, installation of an alarm system, rent of a safe depository).

At the same time, the bank presented agreements on behalf of the cash-out offices, according to which they allegedly received bills in exchange for gold coins from some four companies (where the bank got such documents from is a mystery). In such cases, lawyers often talk about the formation of a formal document flow, which is necessary in order to lengthen the chain of operations and divert traces from the interested party.

By law, legal entities and individual entrepreneurs engaged in transactions with precious metals are subject to special registration. But, as it turned out, those same four companies are not registered with the Federal Assay Chamber of Russia. But the offices affiliated with the bank, which presented the bills for payment, are on such an account, but, contrary to the law, do not have personal accounts on the Rosfinmonitoring website.

The economic activity of mass buying of coins is not economically justified, since it cannot bring any profit. After all, the initial purchase of St. George the Victorious is possible only in banks that sell such coins at a rate that is higher than the resale price of such a coin to a bank, by analogy with foreign currency exchange: a bank always sells a coin for more than it buys.

Thus, the activities of the cash-out offices mentioned above cannot be called economically feasible. It can be assumed that it is aimed at hiding the ultimate beneficiary of the coins. And since the coins are exchanged for bills of the bank “Razvitie-Stolitsa”, the bankruptcy trustee of the bankrupt “Forus” had an opinion about the bank’s benefit from such atypical and non-transparent capital movements.

This whole story is very similar to what was announced at the Central Bank last winter.

For reference: The direct managers and beneficiaries of the Razvitie-Stolitsa Bank are Rustem Teregulov, who owns 48.008% of the shares and Tatyana Kharitonova, who owns 32.6606666667% of the shares (data as of 2020). It is known that Teregulov and Kharitonova have joint children … […]

The original of this material

© @tot115fz01/12/2023 09:00, Illustration: @tot115fz

By what signs do banks catch this scheme.

Investment coins are purchased and sold by organizations with signs of fictitiousness, the type of activity of which company is not related to financial intermediation, investment activities.

Large transaction size (10-25 million rubles).

The sale of investment coins to the bank is carried out by individuals who have signs of nominees (drops).

Transaction participants have a high or medium level of KYC risk with signs of cashing out.