The Russian banking sector has become the target of many corrupt figures, because banks are a long and huge resource for theft. Moreover, if things are going very well in a banking institution, you can always expect the support of the Central Bank, because no one is interested in the bankruptcy of a particular bank.
Numerous swindlers use the vulnerability of the banking system for their own purposes. Moving from one bank to another, they leave behind a trail of multibillion-dollar scams, which is then repaid at the expense of depositors or the state. One of these persons is the top manager of Promsvyazbank Alexander Ushakov.
The weakness of Promsvyazbank is that the largest financial institution fulfills government contracts in the field of defense, so the Government allowed the institution not to disclose information about its top managers. On the one hand, there is logic in this, because the lack of public information protects the leaders of a bank vital for the state, but on the other hand, such secrecy is an obvious field for manipulation. If the public does not know who runs Promsvyazbank, the top financial institutions may not disclose their income, property, lifestyle, etc. What management actively uses.
Promsvyazbank
One of the top managers of the bank is Alexander Ushakov, a financier with a huge experience (including criminal record). Ushakov has been working in banking for over 25 years. In 2006, Ushakov, being not the last person in Stroybank, implemented financial fraud on which Ushakov illegally produced credit cards and sold them to bank depositors. The Leninsky District Court of Krasnodar found the financier guilty and sentenced him to 4 years and 6 months in prison, as well as a fine of 550,000 rubles. The verdict entered into force on December 20, 2006, Ushakov went to a penal colony.
He managed to get out of prison earlier, for 2 years. And already in May 2009, Ushakov managed to remove his criminal record thanks to the decision of the Prikubansky District Court of the city of Krasnodar.
It seems that this is where the banker’s career ended, and Ushakov will have to look for another occupation. But it was not there. Somehow, a few years after serving his term, he managed to get a job at Rosenergobank. And immediately to a leadership position. No one was interested in the criminal history of the financier, or he somehow managed to hide this moment from his biography. In general, it looks strange.
In 2015, Ushakov was elected to the board of directors of Rosenergobank, and at that moment the truth was revealed from Ushakov’s biography. In May 2015, Branch 4 of the Main Directorate for the Central Federal District of the Bank of Russia sent a message to the credit institution about the increased reputational risk in Rosenergobank, which was associated with the election of Alexander Ushakov to the Board of Directors and appointment to the position of Director for Strategy and Business Development of the Bank. The bank’s management, either having learned about the criminal past of a member of the directors, or being afraid of negative consequences, quickly removed Ushakov from the collegiate body. But expulsion from the board of directors did not end Ushakov’s banking career. Until the bankruptcy of the bank, he remained in the position of director of strategy and business development. Despite the fact that Rosenergobank, including with the participation of Ushakov, went bankrupt 2 years later, in 2019 the banker sued Google about “the operator of the search engine stopping issuing information about the page index of the Internet site, allowing access to information about the plaintiff.” You can read the full text of the judgment here.
Ushakov tried to clean up 5 articles about himself, in which journalists revealed the truth about the criminal biography of the banker, referring to the fact that his criminal record had long since been extinguished, and the placement of relevant articles had a negative effect on his career. Surprisingly, the court denied Ushakov’s claim. Be that as it may, all the materials that Ushakov tried to hide are now unavailable. It is not known by what method this turned out to be a banker, but the fact remains that Ushakov achieved his goal.
Excerpts from the court decision
As we have already pointed out, the inefficient actions of the management of Rosenergobank resulted in the complete bankruptcy of the financial institution. In 2017, the Central Bank liquidated Rosenergobank.
Data about Rosenergobank
Ushakov himself played an important role in the bankruptcy of the bank. For 3 years of work in a senior position in a financial institution, at least 2 billion rubles were stolen under Ushakov. Ushakov’s involvement in scams in the bank was obvious, because it was on those projects that he led that financial frauds were revealed. But Ushakov managed to evade responsibility, despite the fact that several leaders of Rosenergobank received real terms. In this case, Ushakov was lucky, or lucky to pay off.
Such a significant criminal record of the banker did not become an obstacle to his further work in the financial sector. Already in 2018, Ushakov was appointed to the position of Director of the Department for Financing Industry, Energy and Housing and Public Utilities of Promsvyazbank. How a person convicted of financial fraud after working in a bank who went bankrupt was admitted to the structure of a bank from the top 10 in Russia is a real mystery.
Promsvyazbank indicators (Sravni.ru data)
Moreover, Promsvyazbank fulfills defense orders, so any data on its financial activities are hidden, as well as the composition of the board of directors. Ushakov ended up in an ideal place where everything is so secret that you can steal as much as you want – no one will know about it anyway.
In the year of Ushakov’s appointment to Promsvyazbank, massive manipulations were taking place there. As a result, the owners of the bank, the Ananiev brothers, were accused of embezzling 87 billion rubles from the bank. These funds were allocated to stabilize Promsvyazbank, but went into the pockets of the owners.
Dmitry and Alexey Ananyev
Since then, the Ananiev brothers have been on the international wanted list, in their homeland they face a long prison term. And the bank was nationalized, and powerfully capitalized by the state.
The infamous Alexander Ushakov managed to join the new administration of the bank. And here no one noticed the banker’s criminal train. Due to the fact that the bank’s activities are under seven locks, it is difficult to understand what is happening there now. It is obvious that Ushakov himself feels great giving out interviews on financial topics to respected media.
But a few weeks ago, Ushakov nevertheless appeared in a scandalous story. On August 10, at the request of Ushakov, Alexandra Bayazitova, a journalist and author of Telegram-Canada “Infernal Grandmas”, was arrested. The reporter allegedly demanded money from the top manager of Promsvyazbank for filming material about his criminal past.
Alexandra Bayazitova
The defendant stated at the court session that she did not demand funds from anyone, and she first heard about this story during her detention. Many of the journalistic community supported Bayazitova. But this did not prevent the court from sending her to jail for 2 months, while the investigation lasts.
Publication from the Telegram channel “Hell grandmothers”
Now a banker with a criminal past is a nightmare for journalists, and successfully continues to work in a state bank. The story of Alexander Ushakov’s corruption does not end there, and judging by his role as a “killer of banks”, he will still become the hero of numerous journalistic (and maybe not only) investigations.