As it became known to Kommersant, the Prosecutor General’s Office demands to recover more than 10 billion rubles from the beneficiary of the bankrupt Conservative Commercial Bank (KKB, the former settlement center of the WebMoney payment system) Andrei Trubitsin, his wife and two companies controlled by the ex-banker. According to the supervisory authority, Mr. Trubitsin and persons and structures associated with him received these funds as a result of laundering illegal income, which was withdrawn from Russia in transit through fictitious Bulgarian and Cypriot companies affiliated with the ex-banker. The circumstances of the withdrawal of assets are now being studied by the Investigative Committee of Russia (TFR).
The small Astrakhan KKB, which had branches in Moscow and St. Petersburg, was deprived of its license on February 11 last year. The decision of the regulator, in particular, stated that the credit institution “did not carry out traditional banking activities”, specializing only in the provision of services in the field of electronic commerce (it was a settlement center and a guarantor of transactions within the popular WebMoney payment system). In addition, the bank did not carry out work “to study the economic meaning” of the operations of its clients, among which were “illegal participants in the financial market.”
The Prosecutor General’s Office also drew attention to the latter circumstance during an audit of the activities of a credit institution. In particular, the supervisory authority found that KKB, in the interests of Andrey Trubitsin, who was the ultimate beneficiary of the bank, made void transactions aimed “to legalize funds received from illegal financial transactions and without confirmation of the legality of their origin.” At the same time, the bank itself, according to the supervisory authority, was used by its owner to launder illegal income coming through the Bulgarian company Fincom Teh Ltd affiliated with Mr. Trubitsin and the Cypriot company Northforce Limited. The latter are called fictitious in the Prosecutor General’s Office, and the bank itself allegedly needed them “exclusively for the withdrawal of large amounts of funds outside the Russian Federation under the guise of legal activity.”
At the time of the revocation of the license from KKB, the accounts of both companies in this bank had a total of about $140 million. Moreover, the owners of Fincom and Northforce managed to transfer most of them to another Russian bank right on the day KKB ceased to operate. The circumstances and legitimacy of these transactions are now being investigated by the TFR.
After the liquidation of the bank in April 2022 by the Arbitration Court of the Astrakhan Region, the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA) very quickly settled with all creditors of KKB. It should be noted that the assets remaining in the bank were quite enough for this, and the claims of 288 depositors themselves were relatively small – only about 500 million rubles.
Moreover, after settlements with creditors in the bank, a total of more than 3 billion rubles remained unallocated. Upon learning of this, Andrey Trubitsin, who was the sole shareholder of KKB, applied to the DIA with a request to return the remaining property of the bank to him. The agency involved in the liquidation of the bank did not find any reasons to refuse this and sent more than 2.7 billion rubles to the account of the ex-owner of KKB. Of these, 500 million rubles. Trubitsin translated it to his wife Irina Klochkova. The DIA told Kommersant that they acted exclusively within the framework of the law, since “after settlements with creditors, the founder of the bank had the right to receive the remaining property of his organization, and at that time the agency did not have information regarding the origin of the funds in the bank.”
Meanwhile, all transactions with currency and rubles in KKB in the Prosecutor General’s Office are considered null and void, and since the activities of Andrei Trubitsin himself and his bank “were illegal in nature, undermining the economic security of the state,” all discovered money is subject to collection in state revenue.
At the same time, Deputy Prosecutor General Igor Tkachev insists on seizing funds not only from Mr. Trubitsin (2.4 billion rubles), his wife Irina Klochkova (500 million rubles) and Fincom and Northforce companies (more than $100 million), but also remaining on the accounts of the DIA (takes place in the case as a third party, not declaring independent claims) almost 162 million rubles.
The Gagarinsky District Court of Moscow has already started considering this claim. At the same time, there is no doubt that the demands of Deputy Prosecutor General Tkachev will be rejected. In any case, last year, the capital’s courts satisfied his demands for the confiscation of the assets of the ex-mayor of Makhachkala Said Amirov, the brothers Ziyavudin and Magomed Magomedov, and so on, without any problems or delays. It was not possible to quickly get comments from the representatives of the defendant Kommersant.