Billionaire Laskin did not do the Soviet way with the bank

The ex-owner of the bank “Soviet” Kirill will lose his property in order to pay off creditors. By decision of the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, he was declared bankrupt, having completed the debt restructuring, and was ordered to pay about 2 billion rubles. Against Laskin, a criminal case was also initiated on the fact of fraud. Thus ends the story of one of the Russian billionaires.

Suspicious Schemes

The money received from the sale of Laskin’s property should be used to pay off his debt to the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA) and other creditors – a total of 1.9 billion rubles.

Recall that the ex-member of the board of Sovetsky Bank and the former CEO of Collector 19 LLC Kirill Laskin was detained in St. Petersburg in 2019 in the case of fraudulent embezzlement of more than 2 billion rubles.

The scheme, as the investigation believed, was as follows. It was Laskin who bought a non-performing loan portfolio from Sovetsky Bank for two million rubles, the real value of which was more than 2.1 billion rubles. Later, collectors were able to collect more than 100 million rubles from debtors in less than six months. In addition, as a shareholder of Sovetsky Bank, Laskin took out loans from his own bank on behalf of companies controlled by him. He also arranged loans in other banks, knowing that he would not return them.

According to law enforcement agencies, Kirill Laskin and Alexei Sobolev, managing partner of the St. Petersburg company Prime Advice, tried to bring Sovetsky to bankruptcy. As a result, Laskin was put in a pre-trial detention center, and Sobolev was sentenced to 19 years of strict regime for organizing a criminal community that withdrew and laundered money through Moldova. According to the investigators, it was Sobolev who was the “gray eminence” in the Moldovan “laundry”, distributing financial flows, “however, it is worth noting that he skillfully, even professionally concealed his presence in the maneuvers.”

life on loan

Sovetsky Bank was founded in 1990. 52 of its branches operated in the Central and North-Western regions of Russia. Until 2016, the bank belonged to a group of St. Petersburg businessmen Andrei Karpov (24.15%), Vladimir Mitrushin, Oleg Nikolaev and Kirill Laskin (8.25% each). Sovetsky’s troubles began in October 2015, when the Central Bank discovered a deficit of 10 billion rubles in the bank’s balance sheet. A temporary administration was appointed for the rescue, and in the fall of 2016, PJSC Tatfondbank was chosen as a sanatorium. It should be noted that the main withdrawal of assets took place in 2015 – before the decision was made to reorganize Sovetskoye.

But the license of Tatfondbank PJSC was also revoked. And in 2017, the Central Bank again tried to save the bank. In “Soviet” the temporary administration was re-introduced.

But these measures did not help. And in July 2018, the Central Bank revoked the banking license from Sovetsky. The bank became the first credit institution without a license from among the sanitized Central Bank.

And in 2022, the Prosecutor General’s Office approved the indictment and sent to court a criminal case on the theft of more than 2.7 billion rubles. from a bankrupt bank.

Fight to the end

As for Kirill Laskin, he has been a shareholder of Sovetsky Bank since the mid-2000s. Being a professional lawyer, Laskin was engaged in the purchase of a number of valuable assets by a credit institution. With his participation, the Dalport City development holding was created (Laskin’s share was 25%).

The holding owned commercial real estate in St. Petersburg and vast land plots in the Southern Federal District of the Russian Federation. Laskin was also the founder and head of more than 80 companies registered in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Krasnodar and other Russian cities. Main business asset: Dalport City holding.

In the “Rating of billionaires 2019”, according to the publication “Business Petersburg”, Kirill Laskin took 307th place. His fortune was estimated at 1.1 billion rubles.

As the media reported, Kirill Laskin did not admit his guilt after the arrest. He argued that there was no criminal component in this case, and he considered the relationship between his LLC and Sovetsky to be exclusively civil law. Moreover, the collector insisted that the loans he had acquired from the bank were “knowingly bad.”

An experienced lawyer was not going to give up. In 2016, Laskin, together with Vladimir Mitrushin, a former shareholder of Sovetsky Bank, tried to sue creditors for their property in St. Petersburg. They challenged in court the pledge agreements of two shopping and entertainment centers – on Industrial and Bogatyrsky avenues.

This litigation was not successful. All these years, Laskin did not leave attempts to justify himself and influence the investigation of the criminal case. He filed a petition with the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region to relieve him of subsidiary liability after the bankruptcy of OOO Continent. The company did not return to the bank “Soviet” a loan of 600 million rubles. But last fall, the court confirmed previous decisions that Laskin was the person who organized the management of the current account of Continent LLC.

Last year, he tried to formalize a deal on the assignment of claims between Sovetsky Bank and Collector 19 for the entire amount imputed to him, but the court refused to review the case. Now the story of the slick billionaire is drawing to a close. The fraud case is being heard in the Vyborgsky Court of St. Petersburg.